The Atlantic Abomination (9 page)

“T
HERE’S
no doubt that the tide is beginning to turn, Mr. President,” Barghin told the telephone. “We’ve brought down all the four missiles that have been launched from Jacksonville
since that salvo yesterday, and Operation Mechanical Shovel was a pretty fair success.” He listened. “Yes, I still want UN permission to build that nuclear missile. The risk is that so far the monster may merely have been underestimating us, and has tricks he hasn’t used yet. I don’t know about the biological warfare proposal. I’m expecting a report in a short while and a summary of the progress to date will come to you anyway.”

He said goodbye and hung up. Then he sat back in his chair. They’d taken the command headquarters out from under canvas and put it in one of the vehicles that had come back from Mechanical Shovel. The trick wouldn’t work twice. It was a decided improvement not to be squelching in wet earth.

“Dr. Gordon and Mrs. Trant, sir,” said an orderly, poking his head around the door. The general nodded and got up to receive his visitors.

Mary was looking curiously pale but almost luminous. She was more beautiful than ever, but her beauty seemed to have retreated inside and to be lighting the skin drawn over her facial bones as a lightbulb illuminates a globe surrounding it. Gordon was puffy with tiredness, but he at least managed a smile.

“You’ve been round?” Barghin ventured, after offering cigarets.

“Yes,” said Mary despondently. “After we went through the live casualties, we inspected the dead ones. No sign of Peter.”

“I’m sorry,” said Barghin inadequately.

“I’m getting used to the idea of not seeing him again,” Mary said. “Making myself get used to it. In a way I’m not sorry he wasn’t one of those people picked up by your operation. I don’t think’ if he’d lived through that horror he would ever again be the same man I used to know.”

“They’re in a pretty bad state,” confirmed Gordon.

“I know,” sighed Barghin. “It looks as if the monster made
them go mad when the nets closed over them. They lashed out at each other with their knives, fired their guns … But we have amazingly good medical facilities here, you know.”

“It’s not their physical injuries,” said Mary. “It’s the damage to their minds. The apathy! The delirious ravings!”

“They can’t all be like that,” Barghin said. “They’d be useless to the monster if they were.”

It was a crumb of hope, all he could in honesty offer. Mary acknowledged it with a miserable nod, and Gordon coughed and shuffled papers out of his pockets.

“We have some progress to report,” he said. “I’ve been commuting between Atlantica, where they’re digging out what’s left of the monster’s refuge, and John Hopkins.

“Assuming that the dried substance they found in the hollow needles attached to the oxygen bottles—you remember Dr. Sun reporting that at the White House?” Barghin nodded.

“Well, it was contaminated with sea water, of course, but they got rid of that, and they’ve identified the substance which acts as a hemoglobin equivalent. It behaves in the same manner—gives up oxygen in exchange for CO
₂
—which is very unfortunate.”

“Why?”

“Because this means that human poisons which act like, say, potassium cyanide, by interfering with the supply of oxygen to the tissues, will also be fatal to the monster. By extension, anything which kills the monster will probably kill human beings.”

“Bad. Go on.”

Gordon shrugged. “Well, this opens a whole possible range of poisons, and then shuts it up again if we still intend to try and spare the lives of as many people as possible. I don’t see what else we can do. What we must do, they suggest, is prepare missiles loaded with poisons of various sorts, including potassium cyanide although that’s so volatile we’d have to score a direct hit, and attempt to establish where the monster moved his headquarters to after we wrecked City Hall.”

“And how do they propose we do that?” Barghin’s tone was heavy with irony. “We haven’t had a picture of Jacksonville since the monster figured out how to bring down our fastest scanner missiles. We have faster ones, of course, but they won’t give us pictures we can use.”

“That’s up to you, general, I’m afraid. Or rather, to the technical experts. By the way, I told Vassiliev about this, out at the Atlantica site, and from what he said I think we can expect something rather special in the way of Soviet electron-amplifiers shortly. That might be the answer to getting usable pictures from a super-fast missile.”

“Could be.”

“It had better be! Everything we’ve come up with depends on knowing the monster’s whereabouts. For example, we deduce that the monster’s oxygen requirements are higher than those of human beings, because of his far greater bulk. Consequently he probably suffocates more quickly, so if he could be trapped in a sea of liquid fire that would finish him. Unfortunately, we know he can exist at a hibernation level for a hundred thousand years. He might just possibly be able to retreat into hibernation before the lack of oxygen actually killed him.” Gordon spread his hands.

“And in any case,” said Barghin, “he’s intelligent enough to realize that if he hadn’t shown himself at City Hall in front of that crowd of admirers we wouldn’t have brought it down about his ears so rapidly. He’s probably not taking any more risks of that kind.”

“We should have put twenty missiles into that city hall instead of just one,” Gordon mourned. “Or followed it up with napalm, to seal him from his oxygen supply.”

“I was speaking to the President just now,” Barghin said, after a pause. “He’s applying to an emergency session of the UN today for permission to assemble a one-kiloton warhead.”

“I heard. At least, I heard rumors. The lunatic fringe is saying it should have been done long ago, and I suppose in a way they’re right. Vassiliev said so, when the monster was
still only in control of the
Queen Axexandra
. And I think you said so when it first moved into Jacksonville.”

“I had hopes. So I didn’t press the point.” Barghin lit a cigaret and leaned back in his chair.

“What’s it like outside?” he said. “I’m concentrating so damned much on Jacksonville I don’t know what’s happened.”

Mary broke her long silence. “It’s
terrible
,” she said.

“It could be a lot worse,” Gordon objected. “The refugee movements have slowed to a trickle, as you probably know. The Navy got back the freighter that was kidnapped. Aside from that, there’s just a sort of general insanity in the air. Old women seeing alien monsters in every street corner shadow; people playing the game of ‘What I’d do if I were running this thing’; news commentators clamoring for use of a nuclear missile and others pleading for the lives of the poor trapped citizens.”

“News commentators,” said Barghin. “I had to have one brought down by the Air Force yesterday. He was determined to parachute into Jacksonville and radio back an on-the-spot story. But in general I must say the press has been wonderfully co-operative. If they’d lost their heads the country would have been in an insane panic by now.”

“Maybe not. Since that program about Martian invaders they broadcast back before World War II, people have been very skeptical about alien monsters. I wish this one was a script writer’s nightmare and not ours.”

“General, I’ve been wondering,” said Mary suddenly. “If this monster is so powerful, why does he make people act out these phony ceremonies?”

“These bowing and scraping and praising affairs? The psychologists have been at that one, and given me a workable theory for once. They assume that because this race is very long-lived, the reproductive urge is negligible. But any theory of an intelligent life-form demands some central pivot on which the personality turns. They propose that this power to inflict pain on other creatures and the urge to dominate them
corresponds to our sex-urge in the place it occupies in the monster’s mind. That’s roughly it. They gave it to me loaded with technical jargon. So the monster probably gratifies itself with this lip-service.

“Alternatively, it may be even simpler. It may just be that it’s hard work for him to keep watch on thousands of people continually, and he finds it—or used to find it—worth conditioning his slaves into accepting that he was a superior being by the laws of nature, and so to lessen the chance of their rebelling against him.”

“The second one sounds more probable,” Mary said judiciously. “After all, if it wasn’t hard work for him to control large numbers of people, he’d have conquered the country and perhaps the world by now.” Her lower lip trembled, and suddenly her self-possession fell in fragments. Startled, her companions tried to comfort her, but she began to sob, deep painful surges of frightened misery.

“I hope Peter’s dead!” she choked out at last. “It would be better to die than live the way
he
wants us to!”

It was beginning to appear that he had made a mistake.

Accustomed to instant service from a race of primitives, and under the continued illusion that the catastrophe which had overwhelmed the world he knew had taken place barely a few days ago, he had assumed that he could tackle the teeming millions of human beings without help. But the human beings he had to contend with now were a very long way from being primitive. They were even able to outwit him sometimes.

For instance, the way they had located his headquarters and brought it down with an accurately aimed missile. He had retaliated, of course, but he lacked the resources to wreak significant damage. And they had found an answer to all the improvements he had ordered effected in the stock of missiles he had captured. Again, he lacked the resources to do more. They had brilliantly thwarted his attempt to use his
subjects as an army, by sending robot devices out instead of living creatures that he could control. And the effort of hammering the fact of his superiority into the thick heads of his subjects was steadily draining his own strength again.

Their strength was diminishing, too. Their food was running short, and although he had sent out scavenging parties to collect bodies from the streets and the surrounding country, he had to compel them to eat the proceeds of these expeditions, which hardly seemed worth the trouble.

He would have to resign himself to the fact that these people were intractable and unteachable. He could not find sufficient suitable deputies to replace those who had been killed in the wreck of the city hall, and thus lighten the task of driving the mob. He would simply have to use brute force, discarding the exhausted ones and replacing them. If only he had not decided to proceed alone!

But almost certainly he was alone in any case. Most others of his fellows had been so corrupted by the ease and comfort of Earth that they would have waited till it was too late to prepare themselves secure retreats. Like that stupid one, Ruagh, who had come begging for aid.

To tackle the problem of resources he needed more strength. Therefore he must be fed. It was hard to make do with what he could find in the city, but it would be long before he could train biochemists to synthesize his preferred nutriment in the quantities he would require. He must take what he could get.

Some days passed in the provision of his wants. Certain essential elements had to be hunted down carefully. And the human material he had to work with was diminishing rapidly.

He was still completing his extended meal when the new missile cut the sky over the city. It went so fast he could barely sense it; no human eye could have noticed it. He gave pain to the humans at the nearby missile station, but despite all the improvements to them the
Thunderhorses
missed the new intruder by thousands of feet.

Still, he was not visible, he consoled himself. The only risk
of revealing his whereabouts lay in the stocks of nutriment heaped up before the door of the church where he hid.

That was one reason why the missile that crashed through the roof an hour later came as such a tremendous shock. Another followed it, and then a third. The other reason was that these were not loaded with explosive, but with a poison that would infallibly have killed him if he had not been alert and watchful.

He saved himself by retreating into temporary catatonia, to let the potassium cyanide vapor dilute and disperse. When he resumed full metabolic activity, his mind was made up.

The reconquest of Earth must be a long-term project.

T
HE CORDON
was, on the landward side, a crescent about fifty miles in total length and disposed irregularly in depth. Its forward outposts were all remote-controlled. Most of them were fixed scanner stations. Some few were robot vehicles, light tanks and scout cars., but these were not much more useful than the fixed ones. Any attempt to drive them into the monster’s territory resulted in their path being blocked by groups of desperate slaves, and it was more than they could bring themselves to do to plough ahead through a wall of human bodies.

On the seaward side, some twenty naval vessels patrolled, including submarines. Since the episode of the banana boat that had unaccountably sailed into the sea wall at Jacksonville, it had been imperative to keep all ships well clear of the area.

Overhead, occasionally and for short periods only because of its immense fuel requirements, raced their one “eye.” It was a war rocket equipped with a crude scanner and capable of five thousand miles an hour in low-level flight. From the indistinct signals it picked up they could construct, using an adaptation of an electron-amplifier in use at Pulkovo Observatory for studying the spectra of faint stars, large still pictures of the city. It was a secondhand kind of process. They could never have an idea of the situation until it was already changed.

By now, though, they were cautiously assuming that the outline would not alter significantly; that the monster already had as many people as he could conveniently control, and would not attempt to extend his dominion in the immediate future. The information they had received from the people retrieved by Operation Mechanical Shovel had enabled them to zero in the cyanide-laden rockets they had dumped into the church. But at any one time their missile resources were restricted. The disarmament agreements that had so painfully been put into force had had the result of replacing the bludgeon with the surgeon’s knife, and all the missiles they could call on from existing stocks were designed either for the purely defensive purpose of hitting incoming missiles at high altitude or for police work, excising carefully delineated local targets.

The psychologists, digesting their data, were becoming more confident, and their confidence was contagious. Everything pointed to the monster having overreached himself; misjudged the power of human beings to oppose him without panicking. If this were true, then by striking with precision and at irregular intervals directly at the monster, they could compel him to lose himself in a neverending series of precautions for his own safety each of which would be frustrated by an attack from a different quarter.

It looked as if it were beginning to work.

Therefore, although the authority had been obtained to construct a one-kiloton nuclear warhead and a suitable missile
to carry it, they remained determined to keep that as a last resort. Ideas for new local attacks kept pouring in as the information obtained from study of the monster’s undersea refuge and from the hide and skeleton of his dead companion was converted into principles of procedure.

A picture received from the scanner rocket showed them that the monster had set eight hundred people to work on excavating an underground refuge for him. Apparently he had been sufficiently shaken by the near-miss with the cyanide to stop trusting himself to surface buildings. They allowed the work to progress almost to completion. Then they sent in a volley of four earth-movers; missiles designed to penetrate anything softer than concrete and explode at predetermined depths. The carefully burrowed-out refuge collapsed obediently, and the work had to begin again.

And as often as they could they located his new hiding place and put ordinary flare-rockets into the locality, not with the intention of doing serious harm, merely to indicate that they knew where he was, and were holding their fire because of the human beings within range of anything big enough to do him permanent damage. They had discovered from the returned slaves that the monster was no longer quite so wasteful with his subjects. It seemed that he must have given up hope of bringing any significantly larger number of people under his orders, and was therefore conserving what he had.

Sooner or later, they would wear him down, and whereas it was a certainty that the use of a nuclear missile to finish the job would kill ninety per cent of the survivors, it was only a risk that in the throes of ultimate despair the monster would drag them down with him. They resigned themselves accordingly to a war of attrition.

And then …

“What?
All
of them?” Barghin bellowed.

“The reports say so, sir,” the radioman confirmed. “The entire population of Brunswick which hasn’t been evacuated,
the whole of Savannah, and just about everywhere in between.”

“Get me a ‘copter and alert every detachment we’ve got in the area,” Barghin ordered.

“Won’t be a lot of help, sir,” the radioman ventured. “It says that there haven’t been any reports for nearly an hour from any of the troops we had on the fringe of the evacuated area between Jacksonville and Brunswick, and they’re afraid they were the first to get on the move.”

“Close the gap by remote-controlled vehicles, everything we have. And get me the ’copter,
fast!
”

In the whole history of the United States there had never been anything like this. But there had been in Europe, in wartime. A whole population on the move, by the thousands and then by tens of thousands. Some in cars, some
on
cars, some on foot. When they choked the roads, they overflowed across the country; puzzled, attempting to turn back sometimes, and learning very quickly that that was useless.

Blackening the highway as far as the eye could reach. In the field of his binoculars, Barghin could pick out sudden individual tragedies. There was a mother whose young child could walk no longer, trying to stop and let it rest, being forbidden to by the awful pain and having to stumble on blindly weeping, while the child was left to sob alone. A cripple, one of whose crutches had splintered, trying vainly to get someone to stop and help him get to his feet, and in the end being compelled to crawl because so long as he kept moving the pain abated. And a thousand more.

Barghin located the level at which the pain began to effect him and his pilot. Gasping, they let the automatic controls take them up until they were out of range again, and then Barghin began to marshal his forces.

There was no question of halting this movement by conventional methods of roadblocks or by troops. Roadblocks were by passed, or desperately broken down with bleeding hands. Troops could bear the pain no better than anyone else
and were among the first to turn aside and continue the trudge towards Jacksonville.

The robot vehicles which had served in Operation Mechanical Shovel just reached the fringe of the evacuated area before the vanguard of the column. Slammed together, tires punctured and radiators ripped open, they expired in the path of the herded victims, forming a wall of metal. At first the oncomers were slowed. Then the inexorable pressure from behind crushed them forwards again, and some began to climb on the bodies of the weak. Those in cars had to abandon their vehicles and join the marchers. Like ants, the river of people flowed up and over the obstacle, and went on.

Harshly, Barghin ordered the blowing-up of overpasses and bridges, but this hardly hindered at all. A man can go, if he is driven to it, where a mountain goat would lose its footing. Some fell by the way, but not enough to thin the ranks noticeably. Was there
no
stopping them?

No, there was not. Even the last chance, the sowing of a curtain of blazing napalm across their path, brought such hideous results—when the head of the column was compelled to blanket the flames with their own bodies so that those behind could pass over—that they could not continue with it.

All that day and night they went on, unstoppable, unheeding of anything but a respite from the awful pain that goaded them. And then, when just under a million survivors had vanished into the blank area around Jacksonville, they stopped.

White-faced, the authorities realized that this new influx rendered it inconceivable that they should use their nuclear missile against the town. And white-faced, the population at large clamored for it to be used at once. …

It had long ago become difficult for Peter to believe that the outside world still existed. His last link with it was gone. He no longer saw, as he trudged about the city, faces that he
remembered as having been among the first of the master’s subjects.

He had been very ill for a time. An epidemic of fever had run through the city, perhaps because of the rotting corpses which had never been buried. Dogs had kept the carrion under control for a short while, but one day the master had sent out a group with axes to hunt down and kill the animals that still ran through the streets, and that had become their last supply of fresh meat.

While he was feverish, but still working, still slaving, he had seen Mary’s face in every woman’s features, and the effect of this had been far-reaching. When he looked the second time, of course, he saw the reality. Filth, running sores, bleared eyes and rotting teeth. And his delirious mind had equated the two. Mary was dead. That was a thing he had discovered at the peak of the fever, when he had gone around tugging at people’s arms and telling them, “My wife is dead!”

Sometimes they answered, “I hope to God mine is!” Sometimes they said “Go to hell!” And most often, they did not even hear what he said to them.

His arm had been broken some time during this period. The same blow had embedded dirt in his bruised skin, and by the time he began to think coherently again, and to remember that that had been when the earth-mover missiles brought down the roof of the underground refuge they had made for the master, it was vastly swollen with blue-green-yellow pus. It ached continually.

Because of that, and because of the dullness of his mind, he did not realize for some time that the master was no longer whipping him on.

It was like a blinding vision when he localized the pain into his arm. It seemed to trigger him out of his half-world of gray and into the real world again. He found he was sitting on a broken sidewalk. A gang was working in a building across the road, doing something with fire and hand tools. Making things.
Why had he not been driven to work with them? Because of his helpless arm?

He got up and began to hobble round the city, not yet daring to hope that he had been permanently dismissed from the monster’s plans. But the hope blossomed. These people were new here! They were still healthy looking and had been well fed until quite recently. Their clothes had been laundered within the past few days, and their shoes were shiny on their feet. The master must have recruited fresh forces, and left the sick, sorry wretches that had served him before to fend for themselves.

He trudged on through the city, hoping to find someone else in the same situation as himself, released from bondage because they had become helpless. There was no one. There were many who were no longer strong enough to move, and he left those in peace. Once he discovered a loaf of fresh bread that must have been brought to the city by the new arrivals, and crammed it hungrily into his mouth before moving on.

But the newcomers could not stop and speak to him. They were working frantically, wildly, at tasks whose complexity baffled his dull mind. They were making things, making individual objects, and he recognized that that was new. Once he found men and women picking metal parts out of the giant scrapheap where all the cars had been destroyed. Once he saw men salvaging plates from the banana boat in the harbor and hauling them ashore.

He got as far as the missile station a mile beyond the town, with no one questioning him or stopping him, and there he saw that a structure was taking shape. Electricians were at work on it, and welders, and children laboring under heavy loads. He stared at it dully, making no sense out of its huge struts and plates. There were portable forges standing around. Men were hammering, sawing, shaping.

Beyond, there were racks and racks of bulbous cylinders that struck a chord of memory. But he did not know what they were. He gave up trying to solve the relationship between
all the things that were being done in the city, and moaned over his injured arm.

Then an idea came to him. He had walked this far without being turned back or lashed by the master. Could he walk away?