Seven Conquests Page 7

  Worth looked offended but made no answer. It began to rain again, just a little.

  “Go on now, anyway,” said Joe Eagle Wing. “Let’s not take ourselves so goddam serious. How about another song?”

  “Not in the wet.” Greenstein returned his guitar to its case. The group began to break up, some to the hall and some back toward their barges.

  Herries lingered, unwilling to be left alone with himself. “About that committee,” he said. “You might reconsider. It’s probably true what you claim, but we’re stuck with a situation. We’ve simply got to tell most of the boys, ‘Now is the time to be happy/ or they never will be.”

  Greenstein frowned. “Maybe so. But hasn’t anyone ever thought of making a fresh start? Of unlearning those bad habits?”

  “You can’t do that within the context of an entire society’s vices,” said Herries. “And how’re you going to get away?”

  Greenstein gave him a long look. “How the devil did you ever get this job?” he asked. “You don’t sound like a man who’d be cleared for a dishwashing assistantship.”

  Herries shrugged. “All my life I’ve liked totalitarianism even less than what passes for democracy. I served in a couple of the minor wars and—No matter. Possibly I might not be given the post if I applied now. I’ve been here more than a year, and it’s changed me some.”

  “It must,” said Greenstein, flickering a glance at the jungle.

  “How’s things at home?” asked Herries, anxious for another subject.

  The boy kindled, “Oh terrific!” he said eagerly. “Miriam, my girl, you know, she’s an artist, and she’s gotten a commission to—”

  The loudspeaker coughed and blared across the compound, into the strengthening rain: “Attention! Copter to ground, attention! Large biped dinosaur, about two miles away north-northeast, coming fast.”

  Herries cursed and broke into a run.

  Greenstein paced him. Water sheeted where their boots struck. “What is it?” he called.

  “I don’t know…yet…but it might be…a really big…carnivore.” Herries reached the headquarters shack and flung the door open. A panel of levers was set near his personal desk. He slapped one down and the “combat stations” siren skirled above the field. Herries went on, “I don’t know why anything biped should make a beeline for us unless the swell of blood from the critter we drove off yesterday is attracting it. The smaller carnivores are sure as hell drawn. The charged fence keeps them away, but I doubt if it would do much more than enrage a dinosaur—Follow me!”

  Jeeps were already leaving their garage when Herries and Greenstein came out. Mud leaped up from their wheels and dripped back off the fenders. The rain fell harder, until the forest beyond the fence blurred and the earth smoked with vapors. The helicopter hung above the derricks, like a skeleton vulture watching a skeleton army, and the alarm sirens filled the brown air with screaming.

  “Can you drive one of these buggies?” asked Herries.

  “I did in the Army,” said Greenstein.

  “Okay, we’ll take the lead one. The main thing is to stop that beast before it gets in among the wells.” Herries vaulted the right-hand door and planted himself on sopping plastic cushions. A .50-caliber machine gun was mounted on the hood before him, and the microphone of a police car radio hung at the dash. Five jeeps followed as Greenstein swung into motion. The rest of the crew, ludicrous ants across these wide wet distances, went scurrying to defend the most vital installations.

  The north gate opened and the cars splashed out beyond the fence. There was a strip several yards across, also kept cleared; then the jungle wall rose, black, brown, dull red and green and yellow. Here and there along the fence an occasional bone gleamed up out of the muck, some animal shot by a guard or killed by the voltage. Oddly enough, Herries irrelevantly remembered, such a corpse drew enough scavenging insects to clean it in a day, but it was usually ignored by the nasty man-sized hunter dinosaurs that still slunk and hopped and slithered in this neighborhood. Reptiles just did not go in for carrion. However, they followed the odor of blood…

  “Farther east.” said the helicopter pilot’s radio voice. “There. Stop. Face the woods. He’s coming out in a minute. Good luck, Boss. Next time gimme some bombs and I’ll handle the bugger myself.”

  “We haven’t been granted any heavy weapons.” Herries licked lips that seemed rough. His pulse was thick. No one had ever faced a tyrannosaur before.

  The jeeps drew into line, and for a moment only their windshield wipers had motion. Then undergrowth crashed, and the monster was upon them.

  It was indeed a tyrannosaur, thought Herries in a blurred way. A close relative, at least. It blundered ahead with the overweighted, underwitted stiffness which paleontologists had predicted, and which had. led some of them to believe that it must have been a gigantic, carrion-eating hyena. They forgot that, like the Cenozoic snake or crocodile, it was too dull to recognize dead meat as food; that the brontosaurs it preyed on were even more clumsy; and that sheer length of stride would carry it over the earth at a respectable rate.

  Herries saw a blunt head three man-heights above ground, and a tail ending fifteen yards away. Scales of an unfairly beautiful steel gray shimmered in the rain, which made small waterfalls off flanks and wrinkled neck and tiny useless forepaws. Teeth clashed in a mindless reflex, the ponderous belly wagged with each step, and Herries felt the vibration of tons coming down claw-footed. The beast paid no attention to the jeep, but moved jerkily toward the fence. Sheer weight would drive it through the mesh.

  “Get in front of him, Sam!” yelled the engineer.

  He gripped the machine gun. It snarled on his behalf, and a sleet of bullets stitched a bloody seam across the white stomach. The tyrannosaur halted, weaving its head about. It made a hollow, coughing roar. Greenstein edged the jeep closer.

  The others attacked from the sides. Tracer streams hosed across alligator tail and bird legs. A launched grenade burst with a little puff on the right thigh. It opened a red ulcer-like crater. The tyrannosaur swung slowly about toward one of the cars.

  That jeep dodged aside. “Get in on him!” shouted Herries. Greenstein shifted gears and darted through a fountain of mud. Herries stole a glance. The boy was grinning. Well, it would be something to tell the grandchildren, all right!

  His jeep fled past the tyrannosaur, whipped about on two wheels, and crouched under a hammer of rain. The reptile halted. Herries cut loose with his machine gun. The monster standing there, swaying a little, roaring and bleeding, was not entirely real. This had happened a hundred million years ago. Rain struck the hot gun barrel and sizzled off.

  “From the sides again,” rapped Herries into his microphone. “Two and Three on his right, Four and Five on his left. Six, go behind him and lob a grenade at the base of his tail.”

  The tyrannosaur began another awkward about face. The water in which it stood was tinged red.

  “Aim for his eyes!” yelled Greenstein, and dashed recklessly toward the profile now presented him.

  The grenade from behind exploded. With a sudden incredible speed, the tyrannosaur turned clear around. Herries had an instant’s glimpse of the tail like a snake before him, then it struck.

  He threw up an arm and felt glass bounce off it as the windshield shattered. The noise when metal gave way did not seem loud, but it went through his entire body. The jeep reeled on ahead. Instinct sent Herries to the floorboards. He felt a brutal impact as his car struck the dinosaurs left leg. It hooted far above him. He looked up and saw a foot with talons, raised and filling the sky. It came down. The hood crumpled at his back and the engine was ripped from the frame.

  Then the tyrannosaur had gone on. Herries crawled up into the bucket seat. It was canted at a lunatic angle. “Sam,” he croaked. “Sam, Sam.”

  Greenstein’s head was brains and splinters, with half the lower jaw on his lap and a burst-out eyeball staring up from the seat beside him.

  Herries climbed erect. He saw h
is torn-off machine gun lying in the mud. A hundred yards off, at the jungle edge, the tyrannosaur fought the jeeps. It made clumsy rushes, which they sideswerved, and they spat at it and gnawed at it. Herries thought in a dull, remote fashion: This can go on forever. A man is easy to kill, one swipe of a tail and all his songs are a red smear in the rain. But a reptile dies hard, being less alive to start with. I can’t see an end to this fight.

  The Number Four jeep rushed in. A man sprang from it and it darted back in reverse from the monster’s charge. The man—“Stop that, you idiot,” whispered Herries into a dead microphone, “stop it, you fool”—plunged between the huge legs. He moved sluggishly enough with clay on his boots, but he was impossibly fleet and beautiful under that jerking bulk. Herries recognized Worth. He carried a grenade in his hand. He pulled the pin and dodged claws for a moment. The flabby, bleeding stomach made a roof over his head. Jaws searched blindly above him. He hurled the grenade and ran. It exploded against the tyrannosaur’s belly’. The monster screamed. One foot rose and came down. The talons merely clipped Worth, but he went spinning, fell in the gumbo ten feet away and tried weakly to rise but couldn’t.

  The tyrannosaur staggered in the other direction, spilling its entrails. Its screams took on a ghastly human note. Somebody stopped and picked up Worth. Somebody else came to Hemes and gabbled at him. The tyrannosaur stumbled in yards of gut, fell slowly, and struggled, entangling itself.

  Even so, it was hard to kill. The cars battered it for half an hour as it lay there, and it hissed at them and beat the ground with its tail. Herries was not sure it had died when he and his men finally left. But the insects had long been busy, and a few of the bones already stood forth clean white.

  The phone jangled on Herries’ desk. He picked it up. “Yeh?”

  “Yamaguchi in sickbay,” said the voice. “Thought you’d want to know about Worth.”

  “Well?”

  “Broken lumbar vertebra. He’ll live, possibly without permanent paralysis, but he’ll have to go back for treatment.”

  “And be held incommunicado a year, till his contract’s up. I wonder how much of a patriot he’ll be by that time.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Can it wait till tomorrow? Everything’s so disorganized right now, I’d hate to activate the projector.”

  “Oh, yes. He’s under sedation anyway.” Yamaguchi paused. “And the man who died—”

  “Sure. We’ll ship him back too. The government will even supply a nice coffin. I’m sure his girl friend will appreciate that.”

  “Do you feel well?” asked Yamaguchi sharply.

  “They were going to be married,” said Herries. He took another pull from the fifth of bourbon on his desk. It was getting almost too dark to see the bottle. “Since patriotism nowadays…in the future, I mean…in our own home, sweet home…since patriotism is necessarily equated with necrophilia, in that the loyal citizen is expected to rejoice every time his government comes up with a newer gadget for mass-producing corpses…I am sure the young lady will just love to have a pretty coffin. So much nicer than a mere husband. I’m sure the coffin will be chrome plated.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “With tail fins.”

  “Look here,” said the doctor, “you’re acting like a case of combat fatigue. I know you’ve had a shock today. Come see me and I’ll give you a tranquilizer.”

  “Thanks,” said Herries, “I’ve got one.” He took another swig and forced briskness into his tone. “We’ll send ’em back tomorrow morning, then. Now don’t bother me. I’m composing a letter to explain to the great white father that this wouldn’t have happened if we’d been allowed one stinking little atomic howitzer. Not that I expect to get any results. It’s policy that we aren’t allowed heavy weapons down here, and who ever heard of facts affecting a policy? Why, facts might be un-American.”

  He hung up, put the bottle on his lap and his feet on the desk, lit a cigarette and stared out the window. Darkness came sneaking across the compound like smoke. The rain had stopped for a while, and lamps and windows threw broken yellow gleams off puddles, but somehow the gathering night was so thick that each light seemed quite alone.‘There was no one else in the headquarters shack at this hour. Herries had not turned on his own lights.

  To hell with it, he thought. To hell with it.

  His cigarette tip waxed and waned as he puffed, like a small dying star. But the smoke didn’t taste right when invisible. Or had he put away so many toasts to dead men that his tongue was numbed? He wasn’t sure. It hardly mattered.

  The phone shrilled again. He picked it up, fumble-handed in the murk. “Chief of operations,” he said pleasantly. “To hell with you.”

  “What?” Symonds’ voice rattled a bare bit. Then: “I have been trying to find you. What are you doing there this late?”

  “I’ll give you three guesses. Playing pinochle? No. Carrying on a sordid affair with a lady iguanodon? No. None of your business? Right! Give that gentleman a box of see-gars.”

  “Look here, Mr. Herries,” stated Symonds, “this is no time for levity. I understand that Matthew Worth was seriously injured today. He was supposed to be on guard duty tonight—the secret shipment. This has disarranged all my plans.”

  “Tsk-tsk-tsk. My nose bleeds for you.”

  “The schedule of duties must be revised. According to my notes, Worth would have been on guard from midnight until four A.M. Since I do not know precisely what other jobs his fellows are assigned to, I cannot single any one of them out to replace him. Will you do so? Select a man who can then sleep later tomorrow morning?”

  “Why?” asked Herries.

  “Why? Because…because—”

  “I know. Because Washington said so. Washington is afraid some nasty dinosaur from what is going to be Russia will sneak in and look at an unguarded crate and hurry home with the information. Sure, I’ll do it. I just wanted to hear you sputter.”

  Herries thought he made out an indignant breath sucked past an upper plate. “Very good,” said the clerk. “Make the necessary arrangements for tonight, and we will work out a new rotation of watches tomorrow—”

  Herries put the receiver back.

  The list of tight-lipped, tight-minded types was somewhere in his desk, he knew vaguely. A copy, rather. Symonds had a copy, and no doubt copies would be going to the Pentagon and the FBI and the Transoco personnel office and—Well, look at the list, compare it with the work schedule, see who wouldn’t be doing anything of critical importance tomorrow forenoon, and put him on a bit of sentry-go. Simple.

  Herries took another swig. He could resign, he thought. He could back out of the whole fantastically stupid, fantastically meaningless operation. He wasn’t compelled to work. Of course, they could hold him for the rest of his contract. It would be a lonesome year. Or maybe not; maybe a few others would trickle in to keep him company. To be sure, he’d then be under surveillance the rest of his life. But who wasn’t, in a century divided between two garrisons?

  The trouble was, he thought, there was nothing a man could do about the situation. You could become a peace-at-any-cost pacifist and thereby, effectively, league yourself with the enemy; and the enemy had carried out too many cold massacres for any halfway sane man to stomach. Or you could fight back (thus becoming more and more like what you fought) and hazard planetary incineration against the possibility of a tolerable outcome. It only took one to make a quarrel, and the enemy had long ago elected himself that one. Now, it was probably too late to patch up the quarrel. Even if important men on both sides wished for a disengagement, what could they do against their own fanatics, vested interests, terrified common people…against the whole momentum of history?

  Hell take it, thought Herries, we may be damned but why must we be fools into the bargain?

  Somewhere a brontosaur hooted, witlessly plowing through a night swamp.

  Well, I’d better—No!

  Herries stared at the end of his cigarette. It
was almost scorching his fingers. At least, he thought, at least he could find out what he was supposed to condone. A look into those crates, which should have held the guns he had begged for, and perhaps some orchestral and scientific instruments…and instead held God knew what piece of Pentagonal-brained idiocy…a look would be more than a blow in Symonds’ smug eye. It would be an assertion that he was Herries, a free man, whose existence had not yet been pointlessly spilled horn a splintered skull. He, the individual, would know what the Team planned; and if it turned out to be a crime against reason, he could at the very least resign and sit out whatever followed.

  Yes. By the dubious existence of divine mercy, yes.

  Again a bit of rain, a small warm touch on his face, like tears. Herries splashed to the transceiver building and stood quietly in the sudden flashlight glare. At last, out of blackness, the sentry’s voice came: “Oh, it’s you, sir.”

  “Uh-huh. You know Worth got hurt today? I’m taking his watch.”

  “What? But I thought—”

  “Policy,” said Herries.

  The incantation seemed to suffice. The other man shuffled forth and laid his rifle in the engineer’s hands. “And here’s the glim,” he added. “Nobody came by while I was on duty.”

  “What would you have done if somebody’d tried to get in?”

  “Why, stopped them, of course.”

  “And if they didn’t stop?” the dim face under the dripping hat turned puzzledly toward Herries. The engineer sighed. “I’m sorry, Thornton. Its too late to raise philosophical questions. Run along to bed.”

  He stood in front of the door, smoking a damp cigarette, and watched the man trudge away. All the lights were out now, except overhead lamps here and there. They were brilliant, but remote; he stood in a pit of shadow and wondered what the phase of the moon was and what kind of constellations the stars made nowadays.