Endgame (3 page)

“You know,” said my lance, when I told her my insight, “we don't even know whether these are
discarded
leaves, or whether it's the decomposed bodies of the Freds themselves. What happens to their bodies when they die? Do they have to put some preservative on them, like Egyptian mummies, to prevent this from happening?” She kicked a pile of glop in which were still visible the ragged framelines of Fred head-leaves.

I shook my head. “I suppose we can keep an eye on the captain and see if he begins to deteriorate.”

We figured out that slithering was the easiest way to move along the passageway without falling; it was like ice-skating through an oil slick, but we finally made it to the Sears and Roebuck stateroom.

“Stateroom” was an apt description; it was pretty stately. Because they had to accommodate the constantly changing size of the Freds, the rooms were built to monstrous scale, but with a nice mix of furniture styles. My own, next to Arlene's down
toward the hull in heavier acceleration, had a couple of sit-kneels, a table I could only reach by standing and stretching, and a doughnut-shaped bed-couch.

I had no idea what was inside Sears and Roebuck's quarters because they had not allowed Arlene or me even to sneak a peek. I stood outside the door and pounded the pine, as we used to say at Parris Island, then I thought better of it—Sears and Roebuck had been acting awfully weird lately. I stepped off to one side in case they decided to burn right through the door with a weapon.

Silence. After the second pounding, their shared voice came back with a carefully enunciated “go to away!”

“Open up, Sears and Roebuck!” shouted Arlene, exasperated after just ten seconds of dealing with their intransigence.

“Jeez, you'd never make it as a therapist, A.S.”

“I follow the flashlight-pounded-into-the-head school of psychiatry,” she said, and for the first time, it almost sounded as if her heart were in the joke.

“Go to elsewhere!”

“What are you?” I demanded. “Afraid of dying? Why? You can't die!”

During a long pause, I heard furniture being shoved around. Then the door slid open a crack and two heads, one atop the other, pressed two eyes to the crack. “We once had our spine broken,” they said. They didn't have spines, exactly; their central nervous system ran right down the center, from what I had seen in their medical records. But it was actually more easily severed than ours because it wasn't protected by a bone sheath.

“You recovered as soon as someone found you,” Arlene pointed out. “Right?”

“We lay for eleven days into the jungle on [unintelligible planet name]. The Freds slay us will kill us and display-put us on for eternity and throw head-leaves
at us.” Sears and Roebuck still had a hard time with English, despite ambassadorial status.

“Come on, S and R,” I tried. “Get a grip. You don't see me and Arlene cringing—and if we die, we're gone forever!”

They said something too quietly to catch; it sounded like “we wish we could,” but it could have been “the less you could.”

“S and R, Arlene and I need your help. We need to make a plan for when we hit dirtside on Fredworld.”

“Fredpills,” added Arlene in my ear.

“And we need you to show us how to synthesize enough Fredpills to keep us alive to Fredworld . . . we need about, oh, two hundred and seventy.”

Sears and Roebuck did a fast calculation—forty-five days times two people times three meals per day. “You admit we have no plan for to live past landing time!”

“Touché,”
admitted Arlene, under her breath.

Crap!
“For
now
we need four hundred! We'll need more—lots, lots more—for surviving on Fredworld until we can figure out how to work one of these damned ships and hop it back home. And
you
need pills, too, Sears and Roebuck.”

The two Alley Oop faces stared at us a moment, then the Klaves slid open the door with their long limbs, which grew like Popeye arms from below their necks. “We are doomed inside the cabin as out the side the cabin.”

“So you may as well enjoy your last days of life with freedom to move around,” I urged. “After you die, you'll see and hear only what they choose to show you . . . if anything.”

“Yes, you are the right about that. You must enter.”

They stepped out of the way like Siamese twins, and I entered their quarters for the first time, followed by Arlene. The cabin was so amazingly bizarre that I could barely recognize it as being essentially the same
(in structure) as mine! All the furniture was pushed into a huge snarl in the middle of the room, and every square centimeter of wall space was covered by something, whether it was an abstract artwork with real 3-D effects or a mop head nailed to the wall. It looked like a homicidal maniac's idea of interior design: making the room look like the inside of their disordered minds.

“What the hell?” asked Arlene, staring around at the walls.
Sears and Roebuck stood in the center of the room next to the pile of junk, watching us narrowly. The weird part wasn't that they put stuff up on their walls—I confess to the nasty habit of putting the occasional girly pic or Franks tank action shot on my own walls, when I had something to put. But Sears and Roebuck covered literally
every smidgen of bulkhead,
as if their terror at the pending landing on Fredworld somehow transferred itself to a fear of battleship gray, the color of the metal behind the pictures. They figured out how to work the printer in the room and dumped every image they could find to plaster on the bulkheads. Then, when they ran out of paper, they started attaching domestic Fred appliances with StiKro. They even turned a table on its side and pressed it against one wall.

The overhead was the color of cooling lava, black with red crack highlights, and it didn't seem to bother them. I rather liked it myself, and I wasn't a fan of the wall color—but still!

I looked around. “Do you, ah, you-all want to talk about this?” I tried to sound casual.

“No,” said Sears and Roebuck, without a trace of emotion. And that was that. They never again referred to the wallpapering, they never explained it, and we never found out what the hell they thought they were doing. I think Arlene and I learned something very interesting about alien psychology on Day Thirteen of our trip into Fredland; now if only we knew what we found out!

Sears and Roebuck came out of their hole without looking back, took a new stateroom, and made no effort to cover the walls. We began rehearsing for our last stand, when we would hit dirtside and the doors would slide open.

We even knew what doors would open first. Sears and Roebuck went to work on the Fred computer and cracked it, or part of it, at least. The sequence display of the mission was unclassified, and they displayed it on the 3-D projector in the room we had decided to call the bridge, where the captain's body still sat in the co-pilot's chair without decomposing, although his head-leaves had ceased to grow, leaving in place the atrocious orange and black Halloween combination that he wore when I killed him . . . probably a sign of the emotion of desperate terror.

The timeline was precisely detailed: we knew the very moment we would touch dirt—three days earlier than I guessed—and which systems would operate at what moment. The door-open sequence began about seventy-five minutes after touchdown, and the first door to open after safety checks and powerdown was the aft, ventral cargo bay; it would take eleven minutes to grind backward out of the way. Over the next fifty minutes or so, eleven other doors and access portals would release, and all but two of them would open automatically. We would be boarded by an unholy army of monsters.

The only question was whether the Fred captain had gotten a damned message off before we overwhelmed his defenses. Probably. The final combat took nearly an hour. Would it have done the Fred any good?

At first, I thought that would give them two hundred years' advance notice that we were coming, but Arlene hooted with laughter when I mentioned it. “What, you think their message travels at
infinite speed?
What do you think this is, science fiction?”

I wracked my neurons for several minutes—physics
was never my strong suit, especially not special relativity. Then I suddenly realized my stupidity: any message sent by the Fred captain could travel only at the speed of light. . . . It would take it two hundred years to reach Fredworld!

So how much of a head start
did
it have over us? “Um . . . twenty years?” I guessed.

Arlene shook her head emphatically. “If our time dilation factor is eight and a half weeks, or, say, sixty days, to two hundred years passing on Earth and Fredworld—the planets are barely moving relative to each other, compared to lightspeed—then we have to be moving at virtually lightspeed ourselves, relative to both planets. Hang on . . .” She poked at her watch calculator. “Fly, we're making about 99.99996 percent of lightspeed relative to Earth or Fredworld. At that clip, we would travel two hundred light-years and arrive only
thirty-five minutes
after the message.”

I jumped to my feet. “Arlene, that's fantastic! They won't have any time at all to prepare, barely half an hour! Maybe they can mobilize a few security forces, but nothing like a—”

“Whoa,
whoa,
loverboy, slow down!” Arlene settled back, putting her feet up on the table, narrowly missing her half-eaten plate of blue squares. “If it's actually sixty-one days subjective time instead of fifty-eight, or the planets are really two hundred and nine light-years apart instead of two hundred, that half-an-hour figure is completely inaccurate. And much more important, that was assuming we achieved our speed instantly. But we didn't. . . . It took us about three days to ramp up, and it'll take another three days to decelerate; during most of that time, we're going slow enough that there's hardly any time dilation effect at all.”

“So you're saying . . . so the Fred should have what, six days' advance notice we're on our way?”

“Hm, basically, yeah. The biggest factor is the
acceleration-deceleration time, when we're not moving at relativistic speeds.”

“So let's assume they have six days to prepare,” I said. “That's a hard figure?”

“Hard enough, Fly. I mean, Sergeant. Best we can do, in any event. I'm not entirely sure Sears and Roebuck is giving us good intel on the Fred units of measurement.”

Six days for the enemy to mobilize wasn't good, but I could live with it. It was sure a hell of a lot better than two centuries.

I devised a plan, as the senior man present, though Arlene had a few good ideas for booby traps. If the Fred had six days to prepare for our arrival, we had eight weeks! We made good use of the time, practicing a slow, steady retreat down the ship, sealing off segments behind us and activating homemade bombs to wreck the thing. We couldn't win, of course, not in the long run, but then, as someone once said, the trouble with the long run is that in the long run everybody's dead!

Well, the bastards would pay for every meter. That was my only goal, and at the staff meeting, Arlene and even Sears and Roebuck regularly agreed with me. I kept us hyped by unexpected alarm drills; Sears and Roebuck figured out how to rig the ship's computer to ring various emergency sirens and kill power in different parts of the ship. I did the timing myself, keeping the others on their toesies.

Then Arlene got tired of dancing like a puppet on a chain, and she conspired with Sears and Roebuck to simulate a General Catastrophe 101: all the power on the ship dies except for faint warning horns all the way for'ard in the engine room, the computer (on a separate circuit) announces the self-destruct sequence started with nineteen minutes until vaporization, sound effects of a raging hurricane, and the enviros blow enough air across me to simulate a massive hull
breech somewhere down south. Scared the bejesus out of me! By the time the ship was down to thirty seconds to detonation, and I still couldn't find the blessed breech, I was reduced to running in circles like a chicken with its head cut off, screaming and shouting like a raging drunk!

When I recovered my normal heart rate and respiration, I clapped Arlene in irons for the rest of the trip. No, not really, but I threatened to do so, and had she stopped laughing long enough to hear me, I think she would have been terrified.

Sears and Roebuck had a weird sense of humor: they went in for the bizarre practical joke, like somehow attaching sound effects to our weapons. I visited our makeshift “rifle range”—an unused manifest hold with five hundred meters of jagged, saw-tooth corridor and brightly colored markings at the far end—but every damned round I fired went to its doom with a long piercing scream of
“heeeeeeeeeeeee-eeelp!”
God only knows where S and R sampled the sound effect.

I was stunned when Sears and Roebuck told me and Arlene that the practical joke was the only universal form of humor throughout the galaxy. It was a sad day for me. I had hoped that galactic civilization would have progressed somewhere beyond the emotional level of a thirteen-year-old.

But it brought up an interesting point: was it possible the Freds were simply playing an elaborate and unfunny practical prank on us when they invaded first Phobos, then Mars, then Earth itself? Maybe they considered the humans who fought back to be a bunch of humorless bastards who couldn't take a joke!

“No, that's without sane,” said Sears and Roebuck. “The practicals are unallowed to damageate the victim or they lose their wisdom.”

“Their wisdom?”

Sears and Roebuck looked at each other; they put their Popeyelike hands on each head and gently
pumped each other back and forth, a mannerism that Arlene and I had decided, during the trip, was their way of displaying frustration at our language. “What it is, they lose their cleverness. They are infunny is how you say it.”