TWELVE
A change in command on any level, on any world, must have instant repercussions. Morale will sag or soar. New faces will appear and grow authoritative and forbidding and old faces will dim and vanish. When the change is limited in scope, only small thrones totter. When it is planet-wide a new world of power comes into existence.
On Mars, the death of the Chief Coordinator produced a social, political, economic and military earthquake; or what, on Mars, was the equivalent of an earthquake. The Martian social structure was shaken to its foundations. Political power became a plum ripe for the plucking. A dozen taloned hands reached for it, but the hands of Sull were the most adroit and experienced.
Sull grasped the plum and began steadily to squeeze it, until it began to remold itself to his satisfaction. But it was not a remolding which could take place overnight, and while power was changing hands, demoralization gained a momentary ascendancy.
On Mars there was famine, pestilence and widespread vandalism. There was a wavering, an uncertainty, in Martian military planning. Orders were delayed or garbled, and the commanders of the Martian ships did not quite know what course of action to follow or how much leeway between the golden heights of a soaring prestige and the deadly shoals of treason.
That uncertainty generated a need for solidarity in action, and the Martian commanders, though wary and suspicious of one another, were drawn more closely together in their hatred of the common enemy. They became defiantly reckless, and for the first time Martian ships took to traveling openly in mass formation, in a display of armored strength which they foolishly imagined might bring Earth to its knees.
While Loring and Janice stood alone on Mars, in a small room with one window, under constant guard and completely at Sull's mercy, five Martian ships moved westward across the Eastern United States, and began deliberately to court—Armageddon.
Colonel Richard Clegman of the United States Air Force awoke from a dream of coffee cups set in a row, each cup steaming and unstirred, and blinked sleep from his eyelids. In his dream it hadn't been just the coffee cups which had upset him with their tantalizing aroma, which seemed to hover just beyond the less appetizing aromas of drifting smoke, vaporized rocket fuels and burning rubber. He had been annoyed by the barking of a dog just outside the high wire fence where four Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles stood on their launching platforms with their nose-cones pointing skyward, their silvery tail-fins resplendent against the dawn sky.
Dogs at a guided missile and bombing plane base were an anomaly he strongly resented, but could do nothing about. Air Force personnel in general were not in the least allergic to mascots and dogs and cats were mascots, of a sort. But so were pin-up blondes, and as Clegman did not have the kind of mind which might have permitted him, under certain circumstances, to confuse the two, they remained forever distinct and poles apart in his thoughts.
A blonde pin-up met with his full approval, and he even carried one himself, in a small gold locket beneath his meticulously laundered officer's shirt. Only—he would not have cared to admit to anyone that the girl in the photograph was his wife. To do so would have been a betrayal, because it was important that the members of his command should think of him as a devil of a fellow who could trade Rabelaisian jests with the salty freedom which can come only from a wide range of experience in all fields of human warfare, not excluding the amorous.
That sort of thing made for tough-fibered camaraderie in action, as every experienced soldier knew. In fact, Clegman was quite sure that even John Paul Jones and Lord Nelson had played down the fact that they'd been one-woman men to keep shipboard morale on a gusty, universally shared "I've a big-eyed doll in Tokyo" level.
He had only to think about it for a moment for Korean War memories to come roaring back, with the deck of the Flat Top awash in the dawn and the big bombing planes warming up. Not as big as the jets of today but big enough.
"If I live through this one, Commander, I won't just phone Maizie. It's six dolls for me, if I have to burn up the wires and run into debt getting them on long distance and paying their fares on a Borling Special. How about you, Commander? I'll bet you've got a dozen cuties from Miami to Tahiti you're keeping mum about. I don't blame you—with brunettes at a premium and blondes and redheads so scarce you've got to dazzle them with at least seven wound stripes. How about it Commander? I'm sort of curious."
"That's my business."
"Oh, sure, sure. You could get sore and pull rank on me. But you won't. You're too human a guy. Why don't we form a pool and trade a few phone numbers? We could make it a party to end all parties. A real bang-up night. This time tomorrow we may be pushing up daisies—or sea anemones. How do the jokers put it? The daisies hammer you home. And when you're in a pine box, Commander, you'll sure as hell wish you hadn't let a single day go by."
"You're right about that, Lieutenant," Clegman could hear himself replying, even though it wasn't strictly true in his case. "I can't complain exactly. But there was a girl in Paris—well, if I'd dated her properly I might have been less worried than I am right now about being blown apart."
"Real curves, eh, Commander?"
"Real curves. And not just curves alone. There was a sultry-eyed something about her—"
"Commander, how many dames do you figure there are in the world? Ever stop to count them? I've been too busy myself to add up the sum total of the really special ones I've just missed meeting."
"I know what you're trying to say. There'll be plenty of choices ahead for both of us if we're lucky enough to be alive this time tomorrow. You don't have to draw me a diagram. I've been thinking along the same lines."
It hadn't been true, of course. There was such a thing as loyalty, and when you've met the one and only girl and married her at an early age it kept your far-roaming Casanova impulses from making you even want to talk like that. But you had no right to think only of yourself. A sternly straight-laced Commander could weaken the fighting strength of even a big Flat Top, with twenty planes serving for the moment as a kind of woman-substitute.
Clegman wasn't Puritanic, of course. In fact, he was the exact opposite of a blue-nosed kill-joy.... But you didn't need a hundred blondes if there was just one you thought of night and day. People could laugh if they wished, but he considered himself a very lucky guy.
He had then, and he still did, because he'd been married for fourteen years to the same blonde, and every time he met her she seemed like a new woman to him, because she was always making adorable little changes in herself.
Only, for the sake of keeping up morale, it was something he couldn't let the members of his command suspect. The full truth would have made them feel like outcasts, standing before the locked gates of paradise. So he kept the locket well concealed, and only took it out to whisper, "My darling," thirty or forty times a day.
If someone had asked him he would have lied without hesitation and insisted that it was a picture of Jayne Mansfield.
He was awake now, fully awake and not even the cups of black coffee he'd dreamt about could make more supportable the harsh realities of his command, or keep them at arm's length any longer. Besides, he had merely sniffed the coffee without tasting it and all of the cups had been whisked away out of sight by a dozen agile-fingered memories. Agile-fingered at first and then iron-fisted, and dominated by a pair of silver eagles.
The eagles were on the shoulders of his uniform, which was draped across a chair on the opposite side of the room. He found himself wishing that the eagles were maple leaves or, better still, the silver bars of a lieutenant. Hell—why stop there? A private's uniform would have suited him fine.
He luxuriated in the thought for a moment, thinking of how nice it would be to hop in a jeep and go calling on his wife, not caring if he was docked a month's pay and given eight days in the guardhouse. If only he could forget for an hour that the I B M's were Top Secret and had to be zealously guarded by high-ranking officers every hour of the day and night.
Well, he couldn't and that was that. He had eagles to remind him that his duty was an awesome one and that he ought to feel proud. Probably he did, but when you started thinking in terms of tomorrow you felt humble and unimportant. Target Moon, Target Mars, Interplanetary Guided Missiles. Not yet, but soon. And if one of them exploded on takeoff it would tear out your guts, because you'd know exactly what the big babies cost.
You couldn't build them overnight.
In addition to the I B M's, there were eight land-based bombers groomed for instant takeoff just south of the missile launching area and the entire base was under the command of a two-star general who did his best to be everywhere at once, but couldn't quite manage it.
Clegman often found himself wondering if the general wouldn't have preferred the less complicated duties of a master sergeant if it wouldn't have meant giving up such a massive kind of prestige. A colonel could demote himself in his mind without undergoing quite such an emotional wrench, but it was probably too much to expect of a general. He'd have to suffer in silence and delegate as much authority as he safely could to Clegman, who had earned his eagles the hard way, on a twice almost bombed-out Flat Top.
Clegman had to admit that almost everyone in the Air Force had earned his insignia the hard way, whether West Pointers or not. He supposed that went for the other branches of the Service as well but the Air Force was an island universe in itself, and he was well content not to look beyond it.
He wouldn't have too much minded being a two-star general but the private idea appealed to him more. Privates had no major headaches at all until they stepped out of line, which they were certain to do sooner or later.
But the penalties for minor infractions were seldom severe and privates had more freedom of movement on a guided missile base than any officer from a captain on up. His, Clegman's, own day was restricted from dawn to dusk, for in ways that were mysterious the I B M's had taken over command. They were like big-eyed owls awake all night in a whispering forest, and still awake in the daytime.
If you were not careful, an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile could lean on you. I B M's seemed to know exactly how to lean and seemed always to be whispering: "We're powerful preventives, chum. You created us and now we have a life of our own. If you don't treat us with respect—awe, even—we may decide to blow up the world!"
Basically it was absurd, perhaps, to think of the I B M's as alive. But were not all the weapons of men a little like fertile ghosts that could walk the world at will, and give birth continuously to offspring more deadly and specialized than themselves?
Had not the rude stone flints of Dawn Man given birth to bows and arrows and arrows to steel-edged weapons? And did not a good many African tribesmen today still think of weapons as the opposite of inanimate?
All forms of animism were primitive perhaps, but just how primitive was the nuclear fission bomb giving birth to the hydrogen bomb? All right—it was only the belief itself which was primitive and the modern world took a dim view of Dawn Age Man's animism. But dim or not, the view could still be frightening.
Clegman was startled out of his somber revery by a shout from outside the Administration Barracks. When a missile is traveling at the speed of sound its sides pick up all kinds of echoes, subsonic, sonic and supersonic. The shout sounded like that, the human voice distorted, shrill with excitement and then dwindling to just below the threshold of ear-perceptible sound and yet remaining somehow chillingly audible.
The same instant there was a buzzing at Clegman's elbow. He leapt up and clicked on the intercom. A voice said inflexibly: "I've just sent out an emergency alert, sir! Didn't dare wait to contact you. You might not have believed it and a delay of even half a minute—"
"Fraser! What the hell are you talking about? Are you drunk, Captain?" Clegman almost shouted the words, an angry flush creeping up over his cheekbones.
"I was never more sober," the voice said, with unruffled firmness. "Go to the window and look out. The south end of the missile area. You can see them from the barracks now, I think. A moment ago I might have had to talk you into going outside and we'd have wasted precious seconds. I'll take all responsibility for the alert, Colonel."
"You certainly will!" Clegman shouted, his shoulders shaking a little as he clicked off the intercom. "Remember that at the court martial!"
He crossed to the window in four long strides and looked out.
"Oh, Lord!" he breathed.
He had always been a doubter. The Air Force had insisted, as it had every right to do on the basis of available evidence, that flying saucers could be given no support at all in official quarters. It had never stated categorically that the numerous reported sightings could be all explained away in easy and facile fashion, but it had maintained a sound, sane and entirely justifiable attitude in regard to them. That attitude was everlastingly to the Air Force's credit. Even now Clegman could find no fault with it. It was just that—here at last was the evidence!
They were coming in over the southern tip of the missile area, still a half mile or more from the base and flying at a very low altitude. Five immense silvery disks, their edges glinting in the dawn light, their summits slightly turreted.
Later, Clegman was never quite able to decide just what convinced him that the five U F O's had no intention of passing over the base without launching an attack upon it. But something did—a warning signal deep in his mind, a premonition that he had no right to delay a counter-decision for another half minute. In the absence of the General—just where the General might be he did not even stop to ask himself—it was up to him.
The invading U F O's were committing an act of armed aggression by flying over an I B M base whether they knew it or not. And both consciously and unconsciously—deep in his mind—Clegman was overwhelmingly convinced that they did know it. It was a very big country. An I B M base was a mere pinpoint on the map and the presence of Unidentified Flying Objects in the sky above it could not possibly have been coincidental.
The long arm of coincidence could never stretch that far—not in a million years or anywhere in space or time.
It was up to Colonel Richard Clegman, who had earned his insignia the hard way on a smoke-blackened Flat Top. Being a man of strength and a man of decision, Clegman acted without hesitation and with no feeling of guilt. He gave the signal for the launching of an all-out guided missile and jet bomber attack.
Corporal Thomas Walton would always think of it as a day to remember. But if anyone had told him that he would occupy a full page in the elementary-school history books of the late twentieth century he would have refused to believe it, for he was an extraordinarily modest young man.
There can be no doubt, however, that a full page was no more than his due. Circumstances alone can create a legend, a hero-image, and when a man risks his life in a hazardous undertaking it is not too important that he is merely carrying out orders and performing a duty which he might, with complete freedom of choice, prefer to avoid.
Corporal Thomas Walton was the first United States soldier to see a Martian face to face.
The Martian ship was a smoking, half-telescoped mass of wreckage and how a living Martian could have survived deep in the hull, in the midst of what must have been a raging inferno, was not an easy enigma for the scientists to unravel or the newspaper-reading public to grasp. The TV-viewing public would have liked very much to see that particular Martian but he died soon afterwards and was never televised. There were eight hundred Martian captives to question, and TV coverage remained so over-burdened for days that viewers did not feel any pronounced sense of outrage until it was too late to rectify an official blunder that was tragic from a documentary point of view.
Fortunately Corporal Walton did see that first remarkable survivor—saw him close and saw him plain. He had been advancing cautiously toward the wreckage with a Geiger counter which was not clicking and a protective helmet which he had just started to take off. Neither the Geiger counter nor the helmet were of any particular value to him, for the wreckage was not radio-active and never had been.
The Martian ships had been attacked by both guided missiles and swooping jets. Three successive bombing attacks had been launched against them. But the small, intermediate-range ballistic missiles had not carried atomic warheads and neither had the jets. The towering, silver-finned I B M's had remained on their launching pads, their destructive potential quiescent and unchallenged. It had been a World War II-type bombing attack, but so sudden, fierce and unrelenting that two of the Martian ships had gone down in flames and another had been forced to land and disgorge its entire crew. The two remaining ships had flown lopsidedly westward, trailing clouds of smoke, too crippled to retaliate with more than a single blast of searing fire. The blast had struck far west of the missile base, blackening two acres of woodland, but missing the base completely.
A slender jet had gone in pursuit of the fleeing disks, and that one jet had been armed in a more formidable way—with a small, gray-nosed atomic projectile. The fleeing disks had not returned.
Corporal Walton was remembering all this as he drew near to the wreckage of the only ship which was still smouldering after five hours of exposure to fire-extinguishing vapor showers from two circling planes.
Precaution demanded that he follow decontamination unit procedures even if the Geiger failed to click, for there was always the danger that there might be unknown and hitherto unsuspected forms of radiant energy in proximity to an U F O which would not register on a G-Muller counter.
But Corporal Walton liked to think that he could determine such things for himself and had suddenly decided to lift his helmet to get a better view of the smoke-enveloped ship.
He did so, standing very still, letting the immense weight of Army discipline and tradition wash over him for an instant like a tidal wave, appalled by his own audacity in defying it and more than a little frightened.
He was taking a dreadful risk and he knew it. Therecouldbe unknown forms of radiant energy that might seep into his bones and remain undetected for years, a slow but deadly radio-active blight which would kill him before he was forty. He wanted to live to be ninety, but he wouldn't have a chance if he went on taking risks like this.
He saw the Martian before the Martian saw him. He saw the hideous, masklike face, smoke-blackened, and the talons that were creeping toward him in a blind fumbling that might have moved him to pity if he had not been too terrified to do anything but recoil backwards with a scream.
The Martian shuddered convulsively, as if a human scream at such a moment was more than he could endure. Perhaps he had heard too many human screams. Perhaps he did not want to hear any more or perhaps it was just pain which caused him to shut his eyes quickly and just as quickly open them again and fasten them on the youth standing white-lipped and trembling before him.
"I did not want to come to Earth," the Martian said. "I am too young to die. I knew this would happen. We are cruel—and we are merciless. But I was never quite like that. There are a few of us who are not like that."
The Martian was silent for an instant and then he whispered: "It is your world again. We took some of it from you, and we would have taken it all. But the Plan is shattered forever now. We give back what we have taken. It is completely your world again."