Doom. Endgame

     1.


     The ship was 3.7 klicks long, and I walked

     every damned meter of it, trying to find where all the
creaks and groans were coming from. I wasn't sur-
prised to hear the haunting noises; I expected nothing
less nightmarish from the Fred aliens. They came to
us as aliens in demonic clothing, playing to every
Jungian fear that panicked the human race, from deep
inside the collective whatever you call it--Arlene
would know. Now their ship sounded like it was
tearing apart at the seams ... or like the entire uni-
verse was finally winding down. I walked down moist
fungus-infested passageways that were too tall, too
narrow, and too damned hot, listening to the universe
run down.
     Down and out. Mostly I walked the ship to keep
some sort of tab on Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders,
my ghost XO, who was falling apart on me. Nobody
goes off the deep end on Sergeant Flynn Taggart, not
without my say-so. But there was Arlene, sitting cross-
legged on the observation deck (the "mess hall") at
the stern of the Fred ship, staring at a redshifted eye of
light that was all the stars in the galaxy swirled into
one blob--some sort of relativity effect. She sat,
unblinking, peering down the corridor of time to
Earth today, which was probably Earth two hundred
years or more ago.
     Christ, but that sounds melancholy. Arlene hadn't
changed her uniform in three days, and she was
starting to stink up the place. I didn't want to inter-
rupt her grief: she had lost her beloved ... in a sense;
by the time we hit dirt at Fredworld, kicked some
Fred ass, and got them to turn us around back to
Earth again, about two hundred years would have
passed for the mudhoppers. Corporal Albert Gallatin
would be a century in his grave. He was as good as
dead to her now.
     Space is a lonely place; don't let anyone tell you
different. The spacefaring surround themselves with
friends and squadmates, but it only holds the empti-
ness of deep space partway off. You can still feel it
brushing your mind, probing for a weak point.
We tried playing various games to stave off the
loneliness; I came up with the favorite, Woe Is Me: we
competed to see who could spin the most depressing
tale of woe, me or Arlene . . . listing in endlessly
expanding detail all the different reasons to just open
a hatch and be blown into the interstellar void.
I always won--not that I had that many more
     reasons to despair than Arlene, but because I had
more practice complaining about things.
     "I left my true love behind," she would pine.
"At least you had one!" I retorted. "All I ever had
was a fiancÊe, and I'm not sure I even knew her
middle name." Sears and Roebuck, our normally
jovial binary Klave pair, were no help; they locked
themselves in their cabin and wouldn't come out.
They couldn't even be coaxed out for a game of Woe Is
Me! But lately Arlene was winning by default: she was
too depressed to play. She just sat and stared out the
rear window.
     The Fred ship was roughly cylindrical, spinning for
a kind of artificial gravity about 0.8 g at the outer
skin; in addition, during the first days, we had a heavy
acceleration pulling us backward as the ship got up to
speed. This was a Godsend; I always hated zero-g,
always. I always blew; I always got vertigo; I never
knew which way was up, because there was no up.
It was 3.7 kilometers long and about 0.375 kilome-
ters in diameter, I reckoned. I had some mild dizzi-
ness from the spin--my inner ear never really ad-
justed to that sort of crap--but it was a damned sight
better than the "float 'n' pukes" we rode from Earth
to Mars, or up to Phobos.
     For the last twenty-four hours, I had followed
Arlene up and down the ship when she went wander-
ing, through blackness and flickering light. The whole
place tasted vile; most of taste is smell, and the stench
got on the back of my tongue and stayed there.
Arlene probably knew I was there, but she made no
attempt to talk to me. Occasionally, I heard weapons
fire; I thought she might be shooting up the "dead"
bodies of the Fred aliens. I couldn't believe it; she
knew they could still feel the pain of the bullets! Then
I caught her discharging her shotgun into a man-
shaped chalk outline she'd drawn on a bulkhead in a
stateroom that once belonged to the ship's engineer, a
Fred who was deactivated up on the bridge.
     "What the hell are you doing, A.S.?" I demanded.
"Shooting," she said, staring dully at me. She slid
her hands up and down the barrel of her piece, getting
gun grease on her palms, but she didn't notice.
"You're shooting into a steel bulkhead, you brain-
dead dweeb! Where do you think the bullets are going
when they bounce off it?"
     Arlene said nothing. She hadn't been hit by a
ricochet yet, but if she kept shooting at steel bulk-
heads, it was only a matter of moments.
     Two minutes after I left, I heard the shooting start
up again, but she denied later that she had fired her
rifle again.
     I returned to the bridge for a long face-to-face with
the "dead" Fred captain. They're not like us ...
rather, we're not like them or the rest of the intelligent
races of the galaxy.
     A Fred alien, and everybody else except a human,
can never die. Even when you shoot his body to Swiss
cheese, so his blue guts and red blood dribble out the
holes onto the deck, his consciousness remains intact.
Blow his head apart, and it floats as a ghost, drifting
like invisible smoke--still thinking, hearing and see-
ing, feeling and desperately dreaming. You can talk to
them; they actually hear you.
     The Freds and other races pile their dead in fantas-
tic cenotaph theaters where they are entertained day
and night by elaborate operas and dances of great
beauty, all to keep the "dead" vibrant and interested
until such time as they're needed for revivification--
assuming there's enough left of the body and enough
interest on the part of an animate Fred to pay for it.
I'd shot the captain nine days ago as he lay on the
floor, reaching up to implement and lock in the
preprogrammed course for Fredworld. Despite the
best efforts of me and Arlene and our contractor-
advisors Sears and Roebuck--a Klave binary pair
who each looked like a cross between Magilla Gorilla
and Alley Oop--we couldn't figure out how to change
course or even shut off the engines.
     I picked the captain up and sat him in the co-pilot's
chair. Poetic justice; he had died bravely ... let him
see where he was going. Now I stood directly in front
of the bastard so his dead eyes could drink me in.
"God, I wish I could repair your wounds and bring
you back to life," I said, "so I could kill you all over
again and again and again, and repeat the process
until you told me how to turn this piece-of-crap ship
around. But I promise you I'll obliterate your brain
before I'll let you be recaptured and revived by your
Fred buddies."
     I blamed the captain for Arlene's psychosis; I would
never forgive him for it and would kill him again if I
ever got the chance.
     Christ, where to jump in on this thing? I never
know where to start to bring everyone up to date.
Sears and Roebuck had locked themselves in their
stateroom, the double-entities shouting that we were
all doomed, game over, pull the plug! God only knew
where they picked up the expressions, but the senti-
ment was pretty clear: when we got to Fredworld, the
most logical outcome was for us to be burned into a
nice warm plasma by the batteries of heavy-particle
weapons the Freds obviously had ringing their hellish
planet.
     I'm not a big fan of logic. Logic predicted that
Arlene and I would be smoked during our last en-
counter with the Freds. They had everything except
the homecourt advantage, and even that was dicey,
the way they could change the architecture of Phobos
and Deimos at the drop of a flaming snotball.
When this donnybrook first started, Arlene and I
both thought we were dealing with actual honest-to-
Lucifer demons from hell! They sure looked like
demons; we battled the sons of bitches deep, deeper
into the Union Aerospace Corporation facilities on
Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars. All the
rest of Fox Company, Light Drop Marine Corps
Infantry, were killed . . . and some were "reworked"
into undead zombies.
     That was the worst, seeing my buddies coming at
me, brainless but still clutching their weaponry. I
mowed them down, feeling a little death every time I
killed a former friend.
     But we faced far more dangerous foes: imps, or
spineys, as Arlene liked to call them, who hurled
flaming balls of mucus; pinkies ... two meters of
gigantic mouth with a little pair of legs attached; we
faced down ghosts we couldn't see, minotaurlike hell
princes with fireball shooters on their wrists ... even
gigantic one-eyed pumpkins that floated and spat
lightning balls at us! But the worst of all were the
steam demons: fifteen feet tall with rocket launchers,
it was virtually impossible to kill the SOBs.
On Earth, we discovered that the Freds were geneti-
cally engineering monsters to look and act like human
beings, until they suddenly opened up on you with
machine guns. They had a few failed attempts that
were horrific enough, one a walking skeleton!
But the whole mission turned on a fundamental
misunderstanding: when last the Freds contacted us,
we were at the dividing line between the Medieval and
Renaissance periods, like the late 1400s--and they
somehow got the idea we still were. They never
realized how fast we evolved socially and technologi-
cally; nobody else did it that fast! They came scream-
ing in with demonic machines and genetically engi-
neered fiends, thinking we would fall cowering to our
knees, and conquest would be swift and brutal.
They weren't prepared for a technological society
that no longer believed in demons. They weren't
ready for the Light Drop Marine Corps Infantry; they
weren't prepared for Arlene and me.
     We triumphed, and I got another stripe, but now I
was willing to bet a month's leave that we were
driving into destruction. No matter how long your
hand, the dice eventually turn against you. At least let
me take a few dozen of them with me, I prayed.
But without Arlene I didn't have much of a chance,
let alone much reason, to go on. Earth was dead to me
now; when we got back there, if we got back, what
would be left after three or four centuries? Would
there be a United States, a Washington Monument, a
United States Marine Corps? For all we knew, the
Earth was "already" a smoking burnt-out cinder
("already" is a relative term, we've found out; by the
time we get back, it will have happened a certain
number of centuries in the past; that's all I can say).
Stars rolled past the porthole beneath my feet;
actually, it was the ship that rotated, but everything
was relative. I followed Arlene as she traversed the
ship. She set up her shooting range in the aft cargo-
hold, a ways outboard ("down") from the mess hall,
seventy meters high and wide and nearly half a
kilometer long. I was desperate--I had to snap her
out of her zombie mode. I had to do something! So
just as my redheaded lance corporal babe raised her
M-14, I stepped out of the shadows directly in front of
her.
     It was an incredibly stupid thing to do--but I had
no choice, no other way to get her attention. She
almost squeezed off a burst anyway, because she just
plain didn't see me. As Arlene squeezed the trigger,
she realized the range wasn't clear. She screamed--
like a woman!--and jerked the barrel to the left.
A single three-round burst escaped anyway. One of
the bullets creased my uniform; it felt like she had
whipped me across the arm with a corrections staff. It
hurt like hell!
     "FLY!" she screamed, slinging her rifle aside and
running up to me.
     I sank to one knee, holding my arm; it wasn't
bleeding bad, but I was knocked off balance by the
blow--and by the knowledge that had Arlene reacted
a fraction of a second slower, I would have been
stretched out on the steel deckplates, coughing up my
own blood.
     Completely calm now, Arlene Sanders un-Velcroed
my Marine recon jacket and gently slipped it off my
arm. When she saw the wound was just a crease, and I
would recover in a couple of days, she let loose with a
string of invective and obscenities that was Corps to
the core! They echoed off the black saw-toothed walls
and rattled my brainpan.
     She shook me viciously by the uniform blouse.
"You dumbass bastard, Fly! What the hell were you
thinking, jumping into the line like that? Don't an-
swer! You weren't thinking, that's the problem!" She
let me sink back to the deck, suddenly nervous about
overstepping the chain. "Uh, that's the problem,
Sergeant," she lamely corrected.
     I sat up, wiping away the tears on my good sleeve.
"Arlene, you dumb broad, I was thinking thoughts as
deep as the starry void. I was thinking, now how can I
finally get that catatonic zombie girl's attention and
snap her out of her despair over Albert?"
     "Jesus, Fly, is that what this is about?"
I put my hand on my shoulder, massaging the
     muscle gently through my T-shirt. "Lance, I was
about ready to hypo you into unconsciousness for a
few days to let you work it all out in your dreams. God
knows we have enough time--two hundred years to
Fredworld, or eight and a half weeks from our point of
view. I was just about ready to give up on you."
Arlene stared down at the deck, but I wouldn't let
up; I finished what I had to say. "I can't afford to lose
you, A.S. Those binary freaks Sears and Roebuck are
a great source of intel and sardonic comments, but
they can't fight for crap. I need you at my back, A.S.; I
need the old Arlene. You've got to come back to me
and work your magic."
     She turned and walked away from me, leaning
against the hot bulkhead and swearing under her
breath. She couldn't really say anything out loud, not
after I had made a point of dragging rank into it (I
called her "Lance" to drive home the chain of com-
mand). But nothing in the UCMJ said she had to like
it.
     She didn't. She wouldn't speak to me the rest of the
day, and all of the next. She took to sulking in the big
lantern-lit cabin we had dubbed the mess hall, since
that was where we took our meals--well, used to take
them; Sears and Roebuck were still holed up in their
own stateroom, cowering in terror at the upcoming
brawl with the Freds when we hit dirtside; and Arlene
ate Anywhere But There, so she wouldn't have to eat
with me; when I entered, she left by another portal, so
I ate alone. Then when I left to return to duty (staring
out the forward video screen, wondering when some-
thing would happen), Arlene snuck in and hid away
from me.
     I barely saw her any more often than I had before
. . . but I felt a thousand percent relieved, because
now she was angry rather than desolate and apathetic.
Anger. Now that I have a good handle on. I'm a
Marine, for Christ's sake! What I couldn't understand
was despair.
     Angry Marines don't stay angry for long, especially
not at their NCOs. Sergeants are buttheads; we'd both
known that since Parris Island! After a while, Arlene
took to haunting the mess hall when I was there,
sitting far away; then she sat at my too-tall table, but
at the other end; then she got around to eating across
from me ... but she glared a hell of a lot.
     I waited, patiently and quietly. Eventually, her
need for human company battered down her fury at
me for risking my life like I did, and she started
making snippy comments.
     I knew I'd won when she sat down four days after
the shooting incident and demanded, "All right, Ser-
geant, now tell me again why you had to do something
so bone-sick stupid as to step in front of a live rifle."
"To piss you off," I answered, truthfully.
     Arlene stared, her mouth hanging open. She had
shaved her hair into a high-and-tight again, and it was
so short on top, it was almost iridescent orange. Her
uniform was freshly laundered--Sears and Roebuck
had showed us how to use the Fred washing machines
when we first took over the ship, two weeks earlier--
and I swear to God she had ironed everything. She
had been working out, too; she looked harder, tighter
than she had just a few days earlier, and it wasn't just
her haircut. Now I was the only one getting soft and
flabby.
     "To piss me off? For God's sake, why?"
"A.S.," I said, leaning so close we were breathing
each other's O2, "I don't think you realize how close I
came to losing you. Despair is a terrible, terrible
mental illness; apathy is a freaking disease. I had to do
something so shocking, something to give you such a
burst of adrenaline, that it would jerk you out of your
feedback loop and drag you, kicking and screaming,
back to the here and now."
     I scratched my stubbly chin, feeling myself flush.
"All right, maybe it was pretty bone-sick stupid. But I
was desperate! What should I have done? I don't think
you know just what you mean to me, old girl."
She slid up to sit cross-legged on the table, staring
around the huge empty mess hall. No officers around,
and no non-coms but me. Why not? "Fly," she said,
"I don't think you know just what Albert meant to
me. Means--meant--is he dead or alive now?"
     "Probably still alive. It's only been about twenty
years or so on Earth ... or will have only been by this
point, when we get back there--by which point, it'll
have been two centuries. It's weird; it's confusing; it's
not worth worrying about." I ate another blue square;
they tasted somewhat like ravioli--crunchy outside
and stuffed with worms that tasted half like cheese,
half like chocolate cake. It sounds dreadful, but really
it's not bad when you get used to it. A lot better than
the orange squares and gray dumplings, which tasted
like rotten fish. The Fred aliens had truly stomach-
turning tastes, by and large.
     "Fly, when I first joined the squad--you remember
Gunny Goforth and the William Tell apple on the
head duel?--you were my only friend then."
     I remembered the incident. Gunnery Sergeant Go-
forth was just being an asshole because he didn't
think women belonged in the Corps--not the Corps
and definitely not the Light Drop Marine Corps
Infantry--and no way in the nine circles of hell, not
by the livin' Gawd that made him, was Gunnery
Sergeant Harlan E. Goforth ever going to let some
pussy into Fox Company, the machoest, fightingest
company of the whole macho, fighting Light Drop!
He decreed that no gal could join his company
unless she proved herself by letting him shoot an apple
off her head! And Arlene did it! She stood there and let
him take it off with a clean shot from a .30-99 bolt-
action sniper piece. With iron sights, yet.
     Then, with a little malicious sneer on her lips, she
calmly tossed a second apple to Goforth and made
him wear the fruit while she did the William Tell bit.
We all loved it; to his credit, the gunny stood tall and
didn't flinch and let her pop it off his dome at fifty
meters. After that, what could the Grand Old Man do
but welcome her to Fox, however reluctantly?
Back in the Freds' mess hall, Arlene continued,
nibbling at her own blue square. "You're still my best
and first, Fly. But Albert was the first man I really
loved. Wilhelm Dodd was the first guy to care about
me that way; but I didn't know what love meant until
... oh Jesus, that sounds really stupid, doesn't it?"
I climbed onto the table myself, and we sat back to
back. I liked feeling her warmth against me. It was
like keeping double-watch, looking both ways at once.
"No. It would have sounded dumb, except I know
exactly what you mean. I felt that once, too: young girl
in high school, before I joined the Corps."
     "You never told me, Sergeant--Fly."
"We got as close as you could in a motor vehicle not
built for the purpose. She swore she was being reli-
gious about the pill, but she got pregnant anyway. I
offered to pay either way, and she chose the abortion.
After that, well, it just wasn't there anymore; I think
they sucked more than the fetus out, to be perfectly
grotesque about it ... We stopped pretending to be
boyfriend-girlfriend when it just got too painful; and
then she and her parents moved away. She just waved
goodbye, and I nodded."
     Arlene snorted. "That's the longest rap you've ever
given me, Fly. Where'd you read it?"
     "God's own truth, A.S. Really happened just that
way."
     Arlene leaned back against me, while I stared out
the aft port at the redshifted starblob; the mess hall
was at the south end of a north-going ship, 1.9
kilometers from the bridge, which was located amid-
ships, surrounded by a hundred meters of some weird
steel-titanium alloy, and 3.7 kilometers from the
engines, all the way for'ard. Sitting in the mess hall,
we could look directly backward out a huge, thick,
plexiglass window while traveling very near the speed
of light relative to the stars behind us.
     It was a fascinating view; according to astronomical
theory--which I'd had plenty of time to read about
since we'd been burning from star to star--at relativ-
istic speeds, the light actually bends: all the stars
forward press together into a blue blob at the front, all
the ones aft press into a red lump at the stern. I wasn't
sure how fast we were going, but the formula was easy
enough to use if I really got interested.
     "I just had a horrible thought," I said. "We only
brought along enough Fredpills to last a few days. We
didn't plan on spending weeks here." Arlene didn't
say anything, so I continued. "We'll have to find the
Fred recombinant machine and figure out how to use
it; maybe Sears and Roebuck know." Fredpills sup-
plied the amino acids and vitamins essential to hu-
mans that Freds lacked in their diet; without them, we
would starve to death, no matter how much Fred food
we ate.
     "Fly," she said, off in another world, "I'm starting
not to care about the Freds anymore. I know why they
attacked us: they were terrified of what we repre-
sented, death and an honest-to-God soul, and maybe
the god of the Israelites is right, huh? Maybe we're the
immortal ones ... not the rest of them, the ones who
can't die."
     "So are you thinking that Albert still exists some-
where, maybe in heaven?" I was trying to wrap myself
around her problem, not having much luck.
     She shrugged; I felt it roughly. "So he himself
believed; I would never contradict an article of my
honey's faith, especially when I don't have any con-
trary evidence."
     "Translation into English?"
"I've just stopped caring about the Fred aliens, Fly.
They're frightened, desperate, and pretty pathetic.
And they're soulless. I mean, two humans against how
many of them? Even when Albert and Jill joined us,
we were still four against a planetful! And we kicked
ass. Maybe it's just the Marine in me, but I'm starting
to wonder why we're bothering with these dweebs."
"Well, we've got about forty-five days left to get our
heads straight for what's probably going to be the final
curtain for Fly and Arlene, not to mention poor old
Sears and Roebuck. They may be soulless and lousy
soldiers, but put enough of them in a room shooting
at us and we're going down, babe."
     Arlene reached into her breast pocket and pulled
out two twelve-gauge shells, which she tossed over her
shoulder to land perfectly in my lap. "I've saved the
last two for us, Sarge; just let me know when you're
ready to Hemingway."



     2

     Forty-five days is a hell of a long time when
we knew we were dropping into a dead zone, even for
the Light Drop. Then again, it's not really that long at
all ... when that's probably our entire life expec-
tancy.
     Arlene snapped out of her despair because she
didn't want to spend her last few weeks in a self-
imposed hell, I guess. She had me, I had her; that's
how it was in the beginning, that looked to be how it
would end. Except we both had Sears and Roebuck,
and that's where everything started to break down.
We're Marines above all, and we're programmed
like computers to protect and serve, you understand.
That means we couldn't just lock and load, stand back
to back, and prepare to go down in a hail of Fred-fire
when the ship cracked down and the cargo doors
opened on Fredworld. We had this crazy idea that we
had to protect those two--that one?--Alley Oop,
Magilla Gorilla look-alike Klave, or at least try.
Step one was to coax it, her, him, or them out of the
damned stateroom. We tried the direct approach first:
Arlene and I climbed "up" toward the central axis of
the ship. The acceleration decreased to 0.2 g at the
level of Sears and Roebuck's quarters, barely enough
to avoid my old problems with vertigo. I sure didn't
want to go any farther inboard, that was for damned
sure.
     Arlene didn't look bothered, though; various parts
of her anatomy floated pretty free under her uniform,
and she looked like she was loving it. I tried not to
look at such temptations--fifty-eight days left; I
wanted to spend it with my buddy, not trying to force
a relationship that had never existed and never ought
to exist.
     The "upper" corridors were like sewer pipes, corru-
gated and smelly. The Freds breathed slightly differ-
ent air than we, but it didn't seem poisonous (Sears
and Roebuck swore we could breathe the Fred air).
Very tall corridors, to accommodate the Freds when
they were in their seed-depositing stage, like gigantic
praying mantises ... I couldn't reach the roof even
by jumping.
     Arlene and I slipped and slid down the hot slimy
passageway; it took me a few moments to realize that
the slime was decomposing leaves from their
     artichoke-heads.
"You know," said my lance, when I told her my
insight, "we don't even know whether these are dis-
carded 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 con-
stantly 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 [unintelli-
gible 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!"
     "TouchÊ," 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 some-
thing, 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 disor-
dered 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 bulk-
head, 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 appli-
ances 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 re-
ferred 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 some-
thing 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 min-
utes 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 over-
whelmed 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 hun-
dred 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 rela-
tivity. 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 per-
cent 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 mov-
ing 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 shout-
ing like a raging drunk!
     When I recovered my normal heart rate and respi-
ration, 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 some-
how 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 "heeee-
     eeeeeeeee-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 vic-
tim 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."
     "Okay, I get it. Well, joke or not, we didn't like it,
and the Freds are going to find out just how much we
didn't like it when that cargo door begins to grind
open."
     Four days before landing, the Fred ship began its
automatic deceleration; all of a sudden, we had more
than a full Earth gravity for'ard, once again giving us
a weird, double-heavy vector toward the outer corner
of the room. Arlene did some calculations and figured
that the ship was actually accelerating at about ninety-
six g's--that's what it took to decelerate from our
velocity relative to Fredworld to match orbit in four
days! So there must have been the mother of all
inertial damping fields to dissipate that force in the
form of heat around the ship. We would probably
have appeared star-white to an infrared viewer--a big
blazing flare warning the Fred of our imminent arriv-
al, in case they'd forgotten.
     All good things must come to an end. The night
before we were to land, when we still had not been
hailed or attacked en route by the Freds, Arlene spent
the night nestled in my arms. It wasn't the first time
we had spent the night in the same bunk, stripped to
our skivvies; some people in Fox Company had never
believed us that we never had sex--but it's true. I
loved her too much to push for something that she
would probably give me, even though she didn't want
to, just out of friendship. But that never stopped us
from cuddling up when crap got too scary, or when
one of us was hurting from a failed affaire du coeur.
We held each other tight the night before landing,
Arlene's beautiful high-and-tight pressed hard against
my blue-shaven chin, as Corps as we could possibly be
for our last day--but still needing the warmth of that
one human who made it all worthwhile, even the end.
And believe it or not, we actually slept well: we had no
doubts or nagging fears because we knew we were
going out in a blaze of Marine Corps glory the next
morning!
     Tomorrow came, and Fredworld loomed before us
on the for'ard TV monitor. Assuming no color correc-
tion, it was mostly brown with straight black lines
crisscrossing it at odd angles, with no visible conti-
nents, water, or weather, but tons of gunk orbiting
around it, sparkling in the sunlight every now and
again. Jagged red streaks might indicate intense vol-
canic activity.... "Oh joy," I said when Arlene
suggested the possibility.
     "We should stay on aboard the ship," said Sears
and Roebuck, as if we had rehearsed anything but for
the last eight weeks.
     "Strap down," I commanded. "The atmosphere is
getting thick enough to measure. We might be in for
some heavy buffeting, according to the timeline."
The Fred computer was no liar. We were shaken
around something fierce, and I got seasick almost
immediately. I didn't blow, but I sure felt as green as
Sears and Roebuck looked. Even Arlene wasn't com-
fortable, and she never gets motion sick.
     We hadn't bothered to strap down the captain's
body, and he was bounced right out of his chair. Oh
well, I sure as hell wasn't about to unstrap to go fetch
him. His corpse bucked around the bridge, dropping
artichoke leaves in its wake as if leaving a trail for us
to follow. I hoped he "felt" every blow, the worthless
bastard, however dead aliens "feel" anything!
All of a sudden, I heard God's own crash of
     trumpets and drums, and the ship wrenched so
abruptly, so violently, that I think I passed out; I
blinked back to awareness sometime later--don't
know how long--and immediately felt a head-
     splitting agony, like some Fred or Fred monster was
repeatedly jamming its claw into my skull! The sear-
ing pain lasted only four or five seconds, then it was
gone, but it was another few heartbeats before color
rushed back into my vision. I hadn't even realized I
was seeing in black and white until the view colorized
again.
     Every muscle in my body ached, like two mornings
after the world's toughest workout. My stomach
lurched; we were at zero-g again. What the hell? 1
looked to my side, where I could just see a portal: the
planet loomed below us, barely moving, drifting
slowly up to greet us. I didn't hear the engines
humming. Were we in freefall? What gave?
     Arlene and Sears and Roebuck started thrashing
around, finally coming around to consciousness
again. I had no idea what had happened or how we
appeared to be landing without engines--the only
ones who might have known were the Klave, and they
weren't talking. Arlene started looking around, com-
ing to the same conclusions I had a couple of minutes
earlier; we looked questions at each other, then I
shrugged and she narrowed her eyes. I didn't care, so
long as we made dirtside--but Arlene would stew
over how we had landed for days and days until she
figured it out, unless Sears and Roebuck decided to
get a whole hell of a lot more garrulous than they had
been to date. Unless her serene contemplation were
cut short by Fred rays and machine guns.
     For the moment, at least--a long moment--we ran
silently and at peace, probably our last moment of
calm before the firestorm of combat. Then, with a
groaning thump that sounded as if the entire Fred
ship were tearing in half along the major axis, we
jerked to a stop on some sort of runway. We had
arrived on Fredworld, shaken but not stirred.
Quickly, I got my troops unstrapped, and we hus-
tled along to our stations, just in case the Fred fooled
us by cutting their way inside without waiting for the
doors to open. Nothing happened, and we waited out
the landing sequencer. Then, seventy-five minutes
after landing and right on schedule, the cargo door
began to roll open, excruciatingly slowly, making a
noise like all the Fred monsters in the world scream-
ing in unison. We braced for the impact of the first
shock troops.
     We waited; we waited; nothing came; nothing
pounded, rattled, or thumped up the gangway. We sat
alone, each in our assigned spots, ready for action that
never came, the war never fought.
     I held my breath as long as I could. Then, about
fifteen after we should have seen the first swarms of
Freds up the gangway, overrunning our first "defen-
sive" position (designed to be overridden, I add), I
clenched my teeth to activate my throat mike and
clicked to Arlene: click, click-click, click, click . . .
Marine code for "nothing this end how's by you?"
The tiny lozenge-size receiver in my ear told me
what I was afraid of hearing: click, click-click. Nothing
her end, either. Sears and Roebuck didn't have a mike
or receiver, but they were with Arlene.
     I waited another fifteen minutes, querying every
two minutes; Arlene responded every time with the
same combination: click, click-click. Or is it Arlene? I
thought with sudden trepidation. I visualized the
monsters overwhelming her before she could signal
engagement or fire a shot, subduing her or even . . .
killing her. Behind my eyes, I saw a scaly fungoid
finger clicking on the mike, repeating the all-clear
over and over.
     I gave with a rapid-fire series of clicks, running
through nearly half the Marine Corps signal code.
Almost immediately, my correspondent responded
with the other half--either it was really Lance Corpo-
ral Arlene Sanders or one hell of a smart Fred captain.
My muscles started to cramp. I stood cautiously,
keeping an ear cocked and an eye trained on the
gangway. After stretching, I returned to my position:
many an ambush has been blown by impatience. But
after an hour of plenty of nothing, even my patience
was exhausted. If I knew they were coming, just late, I
could have waited a week! But more and more, it
began to look like we'd been had.
     "End operation gather at final rendezvous spot," I
clicked to my corporal. Ten minutes of quick walking
later, we all met in the engine room. Arlene stared at
me as if it were all my fault; she kept clenching and
relaxing her gun hand, rubbing her fingers against her
thumb like she were trying to start a fire the hard way.
"Okay, buddy-boy Sergeant dude, what gives?"
I shrugged. "There's no boarding party."
     "Gee, you think so?" If sarcasm could drip, I had
just had a puddle of it dribbled onto my shoes.
I scratched my chin; it was already starting to get
rough. In another few hours, I'd have to shave again.
Funny, I thought the last time was the last time I'd
ever have to do that. "You, ah, want to recon?"
Arlene turned to look back over her shoulder, as if
she'd heard a noise. I didn't hear anything. "Recon?"
"Yeah, recon: that's when you go outside and--"
"I guess we'd better; we're never going to sleep
again if we don't."
     I turned to Sears and Roebuck, but they were
shaking so hard they were blurry. "We'll stay here,"
they said. "We'll be out right. We'll follow you in later
time. We'll stay here until you come back. But we'll
follow you in later time."
     I was a little shocked when I realized that they were
speaking separately! I had never seen such a thing
before among the Klave, never even knew it was
physically possible! I guess that was their equivalent
of multiple-personality disorder, or in this case, a
feedback loop--they could neither advance nor fail
to advance. I expected smoke to come out their ears at
any moment, but they disappointed me.
     Arlene and I found the emergency engine-room
access panel and laboriously hand-cranked it open,
then we dropped lightly through, landing with a
crunch on Fredworld.



     3

     As predicted by the timeline program, the
ground and air were quite hot and very humid, but we
didn't sink into lava or inhale a lungful of hydrogen
cyanide. The ship, which evidently had no name, just
a number, was so monstrous it looked like that
shopping mall in Tucson--used to be in Tucson--
that advertised as the world's largest, until the Fred
bomb. The beast that had carried us a couple hundred
light-years hulked high above our heads, stretching on
out of sight in a generally sunward direction, shield-
ing us from the terrific heat.
     Sideways past the ship were a series of squarish
buildings seemingly built on something soft that had
collapsed; they all leaned, one way or another, at
crazy angles like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The
whole arrangement looked like a demented version of
an Earth spaceport. In the other direction was a
monstrous condo complex erected roughly like a
human graveyard, like headstones arranged in con-
centric circles. The reddish sky added to the "charm"
of Fredworld, its ground that glowed in spots, covered
with eight centimeters of black ash.
     There was not a single artichoke-head to be seen. A
spongy walkway encircled the ship's berth; we cau-
tiously moved onto it, expecting the Fred to come
screaming out of the buildings at any moment and
fully prepared to instantly retreat to our defensive
positions aboard the ship.
     For the next eleven hours we searched that damned
compound--nearly two thirds of an eighteen-hour
Fred day. We found sludge from decomposing leaves
littering half the buildings; either they liked walking
through sludge or a bunch of Fred were slain so
suddenly that no one had time to sweep the place. But
then, where were the corpses? "I'm getting a real bad
feeling about this," I muttered to Arlene.
     She said nothing, just tugged on my body armor
and pointed back at the ship: after eleven hours, Sears
and Roebuck were finally poking their noses out,
sniffing the winds to figure out why they were still
alive. I was so beat, I didn't even go over and tell
them. Let 'em figure it out on their own, I angrily
decided! I'd been on my feet forever, and I wasn't in
the mood to deal with them. Arlene was bad enough.
As soon as it became obvious there were no Freds
anywhere around--hence, probably very few Freds, if
any, on the whole planet, else they would have
stormed our ship, even if they had to send for
troops--Arlene reslung her weapon-of-choice, a
twelve-gauge, semi-auto riot gun made by Krupp-
Remington, the RK-150, with 150-round drum maga-
zine. She set off in a spiral search pattern to see if she
could figure out what the hell happened.
     I stood in the shade, panting in the burning heat.
Fredworld, at least this part of it, was hot as Hell, 54.5
degrees centigrade according to my wrist-therm.
Sweat poured down my face; the perspiration didn't
evaporate in that humidity, especially not under a
helmet. I wished I had a standard-issue pressure suit
with air conditioning; but we hadn't made any plans
to stowaway aboard a Fred ship, so we didn't think to
bring them along. Space suits we had, courtesy of
Sears and Roebuck, but they didn't help with plane-
tary temperature (I asked).
     Sears and Roebuck cautiously approached. As usu-
al, they didn't seem the least affected by the heat or
anything else. They peered around anxiously. "Are
they all dead?" they asked.
     I shrugged. "Dead or gone. I don't see any bodies.
Sanders is doing a sweep. We'll see what she says."
I poked around a little. What I thought was a condo
complex turned out to be a series of interconnected
buildings, like the Pueblo Indians used to build in
caves up a cliff, but these were built into the natural
hollows formed by cracks in the ground. I saw what
might have been molded furniture, but nothing of a
personal nature. Of course, we didn't have a freaking
clue what, if anything, a Fred would consider person-
al. The buildings were bleached white, like all the
color was burned out of them, leaving a pockmarked
surface like pumice.
     Arlene's voice jumped at me through my ear receiv-
er. "Fly, I think you'd better come over here. I've got
a live one."
     "Live?" I asked, flipping up my dish antenna and
homing in on her signal--standard armor-issue, very
useful.
     "Oops, I mean a fresh dead body--maybe we can
fix it and revive the bastard, figure out what blew
through."
     "What? What?" demanded Sears and Roebuck,
obviously hearing only my end of the conversation.
"Come on, boys," I said, setting off at a trot, "need
your magic over here."
     I jogged across the compound, turning as necessary
to keep the beeps loud and fast. I found Arlene in two
minutes, just half a klick distant as the Fly flies. She
was crouching over a collapse of pumice stone, out of
which stuck one part of a Fred hand and foot.
Evidently, it had been unlucky enough to be caught in
a building when it fell, thus not getting out in time to
be disintegrated or kidnapped or whatever happened
to the rest.
     Alas, the head was crushed to a pulp. "Damn," I
griped. "Even if we can somehow revive its body, it
can't tell us anything if its brain is destroyed."
Sears and Roebuck knelt to examine the body.
"The brain appears intact," they said, poking at the
chest. Duhh! I mentally kicked my butt; I knew they
didn't keep their brains in their heads, but it was hard
to remember. Klave didn't either, as I recalled.
"Can you fix it?" asked Arlene. "It'd be icy to know
what the hell happened."
     Sears and Roebuck held the body down and drew a
cutting laser, casually slicing away the head, legs, and
arms. I nearly lost my lunch! The Klave were pretty
cold from our point of view; even so, carving up a
dead body just for laziness, to avoid hefting heavy
stones off the limbs, was a bit much!
     They dragged the torso out of the rubble, knocking
over a few stray stones with it. I winced with
sympathy . . . even dead, I knew it could feel the pain
of every blow. With the body tucked underneath their
arms, Sears and Roebuck humped back toward the
Fred ship, Arlene and me forming a Goddamned
parade behind the macabre Klave pair.
     The Freds didn't divide their ship into separate
departments, as humans do; they used something
more like an old "object-oriented" approach to space-
ship organization: different sections, like different
counties, each had their own essential services--
food, water, navigation, engines, and medical equip-
ment. God only knows how they divvied up the
workload; maybe they fought for it! But Sears and
Roebuck wandered around with the Fred body until
they found a batch of machines that they claimed
were "MedGrams," tossed the torso inside, and began
poking blue and red buttons on a control panel.
A couple of hours later--I watched, but Arlene
went to sleep on one of the beds--the torso was
flopping around, trying to move its nonexistent arms,
legs, and head.
     "Great," I said, "but now what? It has no mouth;
how can it tell us anything?"
     "Vocoder," said Sears and Roebuck, speaking for
the first time since finding the body. They clipped a
few more leads onto the chest of the Fred, palmed a
touchplate, and a mechanical voice sounded through
the speakers.
     ". . . DARES STAND AGAINST THE MIGHTY
. . . WHO DARES THE DEMONS OF UNBE-
     HEADED SUNLIGHT WHO FOOLISHLY TEMPTS
THE . . . PEOPLE OF THE DARK AND THE HOT
     THE PEOPLE OF THE CRACKS OF--"
Sears and Roebuck turned it off. They fiddled with
the settings and played it again, this time all in a weird
language that made my teeth ache--presumably
Sears and Roebuck's own language.
     Arlene had jerked awake at the first noise. She
stared wildly, still trying to cold-boot her brain and
figure out who was just shouting.
     "Pretty impressive," I said. "How did it know
English?"
     Sears and Roebuck stared at me as if I were a
particularly slow child. "Fly, you and Arlene have
been talk around English for eight week now. What
you did think the compu-nets were doing?"
     I got a creepy feeling in my gut, like a couple of
poisonous centipedes had got loose in there. "You
mean that thing has been listening to every word we
say? Jesus."
     Arlene looked around nervously. "Has it been ...
watching us, too?"
     "Sometimes."
"Even when ... during my private moments, in
the bathhouse?"
     "Sometimes," admitted Sears and Roebuck, adding
nonchalantly, "we spent time observing you two, too.
We are curious how you mates if you will demonstrate
use of your mate apparatus."
     Arlene turned red as a radish; I'm not kidding! For
years in the Light Drop, she had showered around
men, used the toilet (or the ground) in front of men,
and even had sex with Dodd in front of the guys when
she got drunk once . . . and here she was flushing fire-
engine red at the thought of an alien and a computer
having seen her naked! I couldn't help laughing, and
she glared M-14 rounds at me.
     "Need to find tuning," muttered Sears and Roe-
buck, fooling with the buttons. I stared, reminded of
about a thousand and one cheesy sci-fi movies that
Arlene regularly made me watch while she gave run-
ning commentary about which star's sister was the
mistress of the head of Wildebeest Studios. ("Jeez, it's
Dr. Mabuse," whispered Arlene in my ear.)
     "Try question them now," suggested Sears and
Roebuck, pretending for their own peace of mind that
there were really two Fred aliens instead of one. As a
double-entity, Sears and Roebuck never had been able
to deal with beings other than in pairs, pairs of pairs,
and so forth: they had no trouble dealing with Fly and
Arlene, but when it was Fly and Arlene and Captain
Hidalgo, Sears and Roebuck threw a fit!
     I cleared my throat. "State your name for the
record," I began, just trying to provoke some response
from the Fred.
     "I will be Ramakapithduraagnazdifleramakanor--"
"You will henceforth be designated Rumplestilt-
skin," I decided. Damned if I were going to try to
repeat that horrible squabble of sound! "Rumplestilt-
skin, I am Taggart. You may also be questioned by
Sanders and by Sears and Roebuck. You will answer
all questions, or we'll leave you immobile on the
planet surface forever."
     "Rumplestiltskin responds. What if he answers
questions from the Taggart?"
     "You'll be disintegrated and your spirit will be sent
wherever it goes upon disintegration."
     "Rumple bumple mumple humple .. ."
"Do you accept the terms?"
     "Rumplestiltskin answers questions. Bumple."
I sighed. I had to keep reminding myself we were
peering directly into the brain of a Fred--a Fred that
had lain dead for God knows how long, slowly going
mad.
     In fact, that was a good first question. "Rumplestilt-
skin: how long have you lain beneath the rubble?"
"Rubble bubble wubble tubble--"
     "Rumplestiltskin will answer the question!"
"I--I--I--I--I--Rumplestiltskin answers ques-
tions. Rumplestiltskin lay for 19,392 suns."
Arlene tapped at her watch calculator again. "This
planet rotates four hundred and twelve times per
orbit, so that's forty-seven Fredyears plus twenty-
eight Freddays."
     "What's that in dog years?" I asked.
"For us, that's about forty years, six months."
"Jesus. Rumplestiltskin, were your people attacked
nineteen thousand suns ago?"
     "Whack smack back crack whack smack back
crack "
     "Who attacked you?"
"Newbies soobies."
     "Was it a new species? Rumplestiltskin, how did
you meet your attackers?"
     "Rumplestiltskin's people met the news on their
own world we expand our great empire we conquer all
we shall pound the Others into hotrock."
     I closed my eyes, sorting through the Fred's tangled
speech. Arlene whispered into her throat mike, so I
alone heard her speculation: "Fly, think they found a
new species on its own planet, and somehow it ended
up attacking and destroying the Fred home planet?"
I grunted affirm; that was what I had figured from
the yammering. But there were some real problems
here; Sears and Roebuck had made it pretty clear that
most species took millions of years to get from
civilization to spaceflight--humans were such an
exception that we caught the Fred by surprise. They
first discovered us about four or five hundred years
ago, while Spain and Portugal were still sailing out in
wooden wind-driven ships to map the "New World."
The Fred confidently assumed we were tens of thou-
sands of years away from being able to offer any
effective resistance.
     They didn't like us; they feared us because we, of all
the intelligent races known in the galaxy, could die.
They decided to exterminate us--another move in
the megenia-long chess match for control of the
galaxy. In the battle between the "Hyperrealists" and
the "Deconstructionists," we played the role of Kefiri-
stan, the poor unsophisticated farmer in whose back-
yard a minor skirmish is fought.
     Hyperrealists, Deconstructionists--the terms were
courtesy Sears and Roebuck, who searched long and
hard through Earth philosophy and decided that
wacko, effeminate, limp-wristed literary critics in
New York were the finest, most refined philosophers
of the bunch. What a kick in the nuts: this great, grand
political war between two mighty empires turned on a
doctrinal difference of aesthetics between two com-
peting schools of literary criticism. Billions of lives
hung in the balance between one dumbass way of
dissecting "eleven fragment stories" and another,
both of which missed the point entirely, of course.
That much, Sears and Roebuck told us, but no more. I
had no idea what the hell that meant; eleven story
fragments? But try telling S and R that.
     His species, the Klave, were members of the Hyper-
realist tong; the evil Freds represented the slimy,
dishonorable Deconstructionist tong. Someday,
somehow, I was going to beat those sons of bitches,
Sears and Roebuck, into explaining the whole
damned thing to me. In the meanwhile, I just shrug
and thank God we soldiers don't have to understand
politics in order to follow orders.
     Anyway, the Freds miscalculated . . . catastroph-
ically. When they returned to Fredworld, raised an
invasion force (taking about a century to do so), then
returned, a mere half a millennium had passed--but
to the Freds' shock, they found not a planetful of ig-
norant, superstitious farmers and sailors, but a tech-
nologically advanced, planet-wide culture with mis-
siles, nuclear weapons, particle beams, spaceflight,
and a brain trust unfrightened by horn and fang, scale
and claw.
     Even after Arlene and I kicked their asses, when we
left Earth, humanity was on the ropes . . . just like the
old heavyweight Muhammad Ali. We played rope-a-
dope with the "demons," and if Salt Lake City and
Chicago were nuclear wastelands, so were the Fred
bases on Phobos and Deimos. Worse, the last rem-
nants of Fox Company--not only me and Arlene but
Albert and our teenage hacker Jill--had managed to
rescue the former human, now cyborg, Ken Estes,
which gave us the potential to tap into the Fred's
entire technology base. The Freds were genetically
engineering human infiltrators, but we were training
einsatzgruppen.
     God only knew what was going to happen, since we
left Earth right at the exciting part. Or what had
happened already, actually. I had to bear in mind that
by the time we could return to the mother planet, four
hundred years would have passed!
     The Freds made a critical miscalculation when they
assumed humans evolved at the same rate as every-
body else in the galaxy. Was it possible they made the
same mistake again, this time to far more disastrous
consequence?
     Time to get a bit more specific with Rumplestilt-
skin: "When you found the Newbies, what was their
technological level?"
     "Techno tackno crackno farmer harmer--"
"Were they industrial or agricultural?"
     "Culture vulture nulture--"
"Rumplestiltskin will answer. Were the Newbies
technological?"
     "Evils! We came to herd as they herded we came to
harvest as they harvested we came to wander as they
wandered we came to herd as they herded!"
     Herding . . . harvesting--nomads? Farmers, just
discovering animal husbandry? I prodded the undead
Fred for another half hour, eliciting little other infor-
mation. The best I could tell was that the "Newbies"
had evidently just discovered agriculture and ranch-
ing; they were just settling down from their nomadic
life when the Fred scoutship observed and studied
them. They made contact with the Newbies and
fought a few skirmishes, just probing them.
     The Freds returned to Fredworld; this was probably
three hundred or more years back, just around the
time the first Fred expedition returned from contact
with Earth. The Freds horsed around for a while, not
long, then they returned to the Newbie system, just a
couple of hundred years after they left . . . only to
find that the Newbies had gone from the beginnings of
agriculture to a heavily armed, spacefaring culture in
just two centuries!
     And that's where Rumplestiltskin started to get
hazy. The rest of the interrogation was long, tedious,
boring, tedious, dull, and tedious; even Sears and
Roebuck lost interest and started monkeying with the
navigational system ... which was unlocked, now
that we'd reached the preprogrammed destination. I
figured Sears and Roebuck had never interrogated a
prisoner before; it's not a process for the impatient.
I got a story, but I had no idea whether I got the
story. This is what I finally dragged out of old Rump,
with me and Arlene making a lot of intuitive leaps
and filling in the background as best we could: when
the Freds arrived at the Newbie planet, ready to take
the "empty" square in the giant chess game between
the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, they
discovered a weird, unknown piece on the board. The
Newbies must have an accelerated evolution that is as
fast compared to us humans as we are compared to
the rest of the galaxy! The Newbies were so stellar that
they tore through the Fred fleet like a cat through a
fleet of canaries.
     And then--this was the part neither I nor Arlene
really bought, though it was such a lovely thought it
was hard to resist--the Newbies backtracked the
Freds and invaded Fredworld itself, utterly annihilat-
ing it in revenge for trying to conquer the Newbies!
What a beautiful picture--the Freds, in a panic,
desperately defending their homeworld against an
unknown foe who had been herding sheep and build-
ing twig-and-wattle huts just two (subjective) centu-
ries before! Arlene and I laughed long and loud at that
one. Sears and Roebuck must have thought we were
loons, since the Klave have nothing remotely like a
"sense of humor" defense mechanism; they just look
at each other.
     The last part of the story I got was the creepiest:
Rumplestiltskin insisted, over and over, that those
damned nasty Newbies were still here. But where?



     4

     Sears and Roebuck began yanking their
heads back and forth again, expressing some sort of
emotion only a Klave could understand. "What are
you on about?" I demanded, still stewing about the
missing Newbies.
     "We have faxed the injuns," declared our compatri-
ot. "To where would like you to go?"
     Another hour had passed, and neither Arlene nor I
had gotten another intelligible word out of Rumple-
stiltskin. "What do you think?" I asked Arlene. "Has
he fulfilled his part of the bargain?"
     She pursed her lips. "I can't think of anything else
to ask. We've hit a brick wall in every direction now."
Arlene inhaled deeply, then swallowed a nutrient pill.
"Yeah, Fly, I guess he's done what he agreed. You
going to burn him?"
     I shrugged. "I promised--deal's a deal."
Gingerly, I reached across and pulled all the con-
nections from the torso of the Fred. I looked across at
Sears and Roebuck, but they had completely lost
interest, their long arms reaching all around the Fred
navigational unit, the one in this district of the ship,
and disconnecting and reconnecting fiber-optic ca-
bles. "You, ah, know where there's a Fred ray?"
The Fred ray was the last-ditch weapon that they
used against us when we rampaged through their base,
and later their ship; it was some sort of particle beam
weapon, much better than ours. Arlene had invento-
ried the weapons on the Fred ship, including seventy-
four Fred rays; she took me to the nearest one, leaving
me to drag the torso behind.
     Turning my head away, praying to avoid vomiting
and completely humiliating myself in front of my
friend and subordinate, I balanced the torso on a
neutron-repellant backdrop, the only thing that would
stop the beam. The body fell over, and I set it up
again. Then I stepped back and cranked the weapon
around to point at the Fred's chest, where it stored its
brain.
     "Man, I don't like doing this," I muttered.
"Fly, he's been trapped dead underneath that rub-
ble outside for forty years. One eye was open--
remember?"
     "So?"
"So for four decades, Sergeant, Rumplestiltskin
stared unblinking at the ground or the sky or the sun,
knowing his entire species had been wiped out in the
wink of an eye by an alien race they were going to
enslave. Fly, he's suffered enough; don't trap him
inside that corporeal bottle."
     My hands started shaking as I inserted a jerry-
rigged pair of chopsticks into the holes to press the
levers, simulating a Fred hand.
     Arlene put her hand on my shoulder. "You want I
should do it?"
     I shook my head firmly. "No, A.S., didn't you read
Old Yeller when you were a little girl?"
     "No, I was too busy reading Voyage to the Mush-
room Planet and The Star Beast."
     "When your dog has to die, Arlene, you've got to
shoot him yourself. You can't get someone else to
shoot Old Yeller for you."
     I pressed the lever, completing the connection. As
usual, we saw nothing. That was the part that both-
ered me the most: as destructive as this neutron beam
was, you'd think you would see something, for God's
sake! A blue light, a lightning bolt, fire and
brimstone--something. But the beam was as invisible
as X-rays in the dentist's office, and as quiet; all I
heard was a single click, and suddenly there was a
huge hole through Rumplestiltskin's chest. Within
three or four seconds, its body was boiling, the flesh
vaporizing instantly wherever the beam touched.
I slowly burned away the entire torso. The Fred ray
was a gigantic eraser--everywhere I pointed, flesh
simply vanished. A minute after turning on the beam,
I clicked it off; nothing remained of the Fred but an
invisible mist of organic molecules in a hot ionized
plasma state. My guess was the interrogation was
pretty permanently over.
     "Okay, kiddo," I said to A.S.; "let's go Newbie
hunting."
     We suited up for combat, and for the first time in
God knows how long, I found myself getting the
shakes. Somehow, I'd thought the Freds would have
burned all the fear out of me, leaving nothing but a
cold husk of sociopathy. Not true. At the thought of
going up against whatever it was that plowed the
Freds into the dirt on their own home turf, my hands
trembled so much I couldn't even StiKro my boots on
tight.
     "Stay here and keep the engine running," I told
Sears and Roebuck.
     "You want to start me the engines?" they asked,
confused.
     "Just a figure of speech, you dufoids," Arlene
explained. "But run through the launch sequence up
to just before engine start .... We may have to book
if we stumble onto a whole nest of them."
     Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, Alley Oop
and his mirror image; they seemed perfectly content
staying aboard the ship and letting the Marines do the
dirty work. I sealed up the helmet and pressed the
other armor seals tight; it wasn't a pressure suit, but in
a pinch, we could survive a few minutes in hard
vacuum. I noticed Arlene's face was whiter than its
usual English pale; she must have figured the odds the
same as I.
     My breath sounded loud in my ears as we edged
down the gangway onto the surface of Fredworld
again. The landscape looked eerily alive through the
night-vis flipdowns, tinted green but combining infra-
red, radio emission, and visible light enhancement. I
turned slowly with a microwave motion detector;
nothing moved around us, unless it was over the
jagged mountains on the horizon.
     "This isn't good," I said over a shielded, encrypted
channel to Arlene. "Shouldn't there be some life, even
if the Newbies killed all the Freds?"
     "Maybe they couldn't tell which were Freds and
which were animals, so they fragged everything. May-
be they used a nuclear bomb, or some kind of poison
or a biovector."
     I grunted. "Doesn't seem likely that they'd manage
to get absolutely every living thing, does it?"
"There's another possibility, Fly: maybe there are
living animals, but they're just not moving."
"Animal means moving, Arlene, like animated."
She didn't answer, so I started a spiral sweep, mainly
watching the outer perimeter. After three hours of
recon, I was starting to regret being so nice and
burning Rumplestiltskin's mortal coil, setting free his
soul. "If that bastard lied to me--"
     "You'll what?" came Arlene's radio voice in my ear.
"Resurrect him and kill him again?"
     "Maybe we should resurrect the Freds on the ship.
Whoops, don't correct me; I just figured out how
stupid that suggestion was." I managed to catch her
while she was inhaling, or else she would have quickly
snorted that the Freds on the ship knew even less
about the Newbies than we--we had already killed
them before we left for Fredworld, a hundred and
sixty years before the Newbies landed!
     The weirdness of the place was starting to get to me.
I kept seeing ghosts in my peripheral vision, but there
was nothing when I whipped around with the motion
detector. "Damn that Rumplestiltskin! He swore they
were still here!"
     "Maybe he just meant they were here when he
died?"
     I paused a long time. "Arlene, if that's all he meant,
then we're in deep, deep trouble. I don't think you
realize how deep."
     "I don't get you. If we can't find them, we jump
back in the ship and return to--to Earth." She didn't
say it, but I knew she was thinking to a dead, loveless
Earth with no Albert Gallatin.
     "A.S., if we don't find the Newbies, I can almost
guarantee they're going to find us. They'll find Earth.
We were almost wiped out by the Freds. We barely
hung on, and only because we evolved so much faster
than they, we were so much more flexible--because
they underestimated us! What the hell do you think
would happen to humanity if the Newbies found us
next?"
     "Jesus. I didn't think--"
"And if they can go from stone plows and oxen
to--to this in just two hundred years, where are they
going to be just ten years from now? What if they
don't find us for fifty years, or a hundred years? Jesus
and Mary, Arlene; they would be gods."
     She was silent; I heard only my own breath. I
almost considered asking her to switch to hot-mike,
so I could hear her breathing as well, but I couldn't
afford to lose control now, not when I had troops
depending on me. Above all else, I had to demon-
strate competence and confidence.
     "Fly," she said at last, "I don't like this. I'm getting
scared." She wrapped her arms around her chest and
shivered, as if feeling a chill wind or someone walking
across her grave.
     "Maybe we can pick up some trace from orbit."
"After forty years?"
     "Maybe Sears and Roebuck has some idea." Yeah,
right. Sears and Roebuck never even heard of the
Newbies until just now, and if they had that hard a
time understanding us and our evolutionary rate--
Jeez, how could they even imagine the Newbies and
what they might mutate into? "Let's head back," I
decided. "We're not doing anything out here but
scaring the pants off of each other."
     Arlene nodded gravely. "Kinky," she judged.
I heard a strange, faint buzz in my earpiece as we
headed back toward the ship . . . sounds, voices al-
most. I could nearly believe they were whispers from
the Fred ghosts, desperately trying to communicate--
perhaps still fighting the final battle that had de-
stroyed them. I was now convinced that there was not
a single artichoke-headed Fred left intact on that
planet, except for the corpses we brought with us--
corpses we would never revive. In fact, I decided to
leave them behind on Fredworld; the temptation to
wake me dead, just tor someone to talk to, might be
too great, overwhelming our common sense and self-
preservation.
     But the notion of ghosts wasn't that far-fetched.
Since their spirits never died, where did they go? I
began to feel little stabs of cold on the back of my
neck, icy fingers poking and prodding me. Jesus, shut
off that imagination! I commanded myself.
     "Huh?" Arlene asked, jumping guiltily. "Criminey,
Fly, are you a mind reader now?"
     I said nothing ... hadn't even been aware I spoke
that last thought aloud; curious coincidence that it
turned out to be perfectly appropriate.
     The ship was so huge that it was hard to recognize it
as mobile; it looked like an artificial mountain, three-
eighths of a kilometer high, over a hundred stories--
taller than the Hyundai Building in Nuevo Angeles--
and stretching to the vanishing point in either direc-
tion. The landing pad was barely larger than the
footprint of the ship, clearly built to order. Weird
markings surrounded the LZ, the landing zone,
burned into the glass-hard surface by an etching laser,
either landing instructions or ritual hieroglyphs. They
looked like they once had been pictograms, now
stylized beyond recognition.
     "You know, Fly, we've never actually walked all the
way around this puppy."
     "I know. I've been avoiding it. I don't like thinking
of how big this damned ship really is."
     Arlene sounded pensive, even through the radio.
"Honey, Sergeant, I've had this burning feeling--"
"Try penicillin."
     "I've had this burning feeling that we have to walk
this path, walk all the way around what's going to be
our world for the next nine weeks, or however long it
takes until we finally get ... home."
     I stared back and forth between the obsidian LZ
and the ship door, torn. "You're right." I sighed. "We
ought to reconnoiter. Arlene, take point."
     "Aye-aye, Skipper," she said, voice containing an
odd mixture of elation and anxiety. She unslung her
RK-150, and I flexed my grip on the old, reliable
standard, the Marine-issue M-14, which contrary to
the designator was more like an updated Browning
automatic rifle than the Micronics series of M-7, -8,
     -10, and -12. These were heavy-lifting small arms, and
the Freds were pretty pathetic when not surrounded
by their "demonic" war machines. I don't know what
we expected to run into on Fredworld; nothing good, I
suspected.
     I thought about calling Sears and Roebuck and
telling them what we were doing, but we were right
outside. If they wanted us, they could call their own
damned selves. Still feeling that chill on the nape of
my neck, I followed Arlene at a safe twenty-five
meters.
     It was hard not to be awestruck next to that ship. It
was hard to credit; the Freds could do this, and they
couldn't even conquer a low-tech race like humanity!
They always taught us at Parris Island that heart and
morale mattered more than tanks and air support in
combat: look at the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and
Bosnia, at the Scythe of Glory in Kefiristan. But this
was the first time I really believed that line: we really
wanted the fight, and the Freds were unprepared for
resistance.
     The ship was gunmetal gray along most of its flank,
except where micrometeorites had scored the surface
or punctured it. Thank God for self-sealing architec-
ture; at the speeds we traversed the galaxy, cosmic
dust sprayed through the ship like bullets through
cheese.
     We reached the aft end and stared up at the single,
staggeringly huge thruster. The ship was a ramjet,
according to the specs: as it moved at increasing
velocity relative to the interstellar hydrogen, an elec-
tromagnetic net spread out in front of the boat,
scooping up protons and alpha particles and funnel-
ing them into the "jets," where the heat from direct
conversion of matter to energy turned the hydrogen
into a stream of plasma out the ass-end. No other way
could we accelerate so near the speed of light in only
three or four days.
     The thruster at the back looked exactly like a
standpipe. I kid you not; I caught myself looking for
the faucet that would turn on the water. We rounded
the stern and headed for'ard again.
     About a kilometer from the stern, we found it--we
found our first, and only, Newbie body. Arlene saw
something and jogged forward; I dropped to one knee
and covered her, watching her through my snap-up
rifle scope. She ran under the ship, finally having to
crouch and skitter sideways for the last couple score
meters; this close to the ship, the underside looked
like a building overhang where it rose away from the
cup-shaped LZ.
     "Jesus," she muttered. "Sergeant Fly, get your butt
up here and eyeball this thing."
     "What is it?" I asked, trotting toward her position
at port-arms.
     "I'd rather you saw it for yourself without precon-
ceptions." She sounded tense and excited, and I
double-timed the pace.
     By the time I approached, I was panting. Jeez, what
adding another stripe does to a Marine's physical
fitness! Arlene didn't look tense; her RK-150 hung off
her back totally casual. She was staring at something
underneath the ship, where you'd have to crawl on
your hands and knees to see it. She shone a pencil-
light on the thing; it looked like a body of some sort,
or was once . . . but definitely not a Fred.
"Hold my rifle," I said, handing it to her. "I'm
going under and take a look."
     She eyed the overhanging ship uneasily. "You sure
this thing isn't going to roll over on you?"
"If'n it do, li'l lady," I said, doing my Gunny
Goforth imitation, "we-all gwan be inna heap'a trou-
bles." The ship overhung us even where we stood,
stretching a good fifty meters beyond us; if it chose to
roll over, we'd be squashed like a bug on a bullet
anyway, no matter where we stood.
     But I sure didn't like crawling under the thing; I
could feel the mass of immensity over my back; I got
about ten meters in when I experienced a rush of
utter, total panic. I'd never felt claustrophobic before!
Why then? The ship felt like an upside-down moun-
tain balanced on its peak, ready to topple over and
crush me. I froze, unable to move, while waves of
panic battered me. The only thing that kept me from
turning around and crab-crawling back out of there
was the fact that Arlene was staring at me, and I
would rather die than have her think a sergeant in the
Marine Corps was a screaming coward.
     After a minute, the panic subsided into gripping
anxiety; it was still horrible, but now bearable. "Are
you all right?" Arlene called from behind me.
"Y-yeah, just trying to f-figure out what the thing is.
Gotta git a lit ... get a little closer." I forced myself
to crawl until I was as close as I could get. I set up my
Sure Fire flashlight-lantern to illuminate the body
while I inched forward until my head was caught
between the spongy material and the ship's hull.
It was amazing, a scene straight out of The Wizard
of Oz: when the Fred ship touched down, it landed
right on top of a dead alien! It definitely wasn't a Fred;
this creature looked more like an alien is supposed to
look: white skin, long multiple articulated arms and
legs, fingers like tendrils, not like the Freds' chopsticks
or Sears and Roebuck's cilia. I swear to God, this
thing actually had antennae, even. The eyes were
huge, big as the cross-section on an F-99 Landing
Flare, and Coca-Cola red; I couldn't quite see, but I
think they continued around the back of the head.
The face was turned toward me, and I got hot and
cold chills running up and down my spine, like it was
staring at me and demanding why? The mouth was a
red slit, and there was no nose--dark lines on the
sides of the face, where the cheeks would be on a
human, might have been air filters.
     My heart started pounding again, another wave of
panic; I was staring at my first Newbie--I just knew.
After I calmed down a bit, I slithered sideways,
through my light; it was a bad moment when I
eclipsed the light, casting the Newbie into total shad-
ow. God only knew what it was doing in the dark. I
got far enough to the side to see the body and legs.
"You know," I yelled back, my voice still shaky, "this
thing doesn't look half bad. It's crushed a little, but I
think it could be salvageable."
     Arlene yelled something back that I couldn't hear,
then she got smart and spoke into her throat mike
instead. "Can you drag it out if I throw you a rope?"
"I bet I can," I responded. I was never a rodeo
roper, but I'd been around a calf or two in my day. I
grew up on a farm and worked the McDonald's Ranch
when I was a kid. "Throw me the rope, A.S. I bet I can
lasso that thing and drag it into the light of day.
Kiddo, I think we may have gotten our first lucky
break on this operation."



     5

     We carried our gruesome trophy back into
the ship, plopping it down on the table right behind
Sears and Roebuck. When they turned, they stared,
eyes almost popping out of their skulls. "What that
is?"
     "I was hoping you could tell us," I grumbled. I had
gotten used to Sears and Roebuck's galaxy-weary,
we've-seen-everything-twice pose; I was even more
shocked than the Magillas themselves at their confu-
sion. "Are you saying this is an entirely new race of
beings you've never seen before?"
     "No," they said, "and whatever disgusting is it is.
The color is all wrong and the eyes are something
horrible. Where did you get it?"
     "Ship fell on it," explained Arlene. "Could this be a
Newbie, the race Rumplestiltskin was on about, the
guys that wiped out the Freds?"
     "Well something outwiped the Fred, that is sure,"
said Sears and Roebuck. "If there no other life forms
of life here, then is logically that is the Newbie."
"Great, fine, cool," I interrupted, "but can you
revive the bloody thing?" I jabbed a meaty finger at
them. "And don't hack off any arms or legs this time!
You turned my stomach with what you did to Rum-
plestiltskin."
     Sears and Roebuck didn't answer. Instead, they
grabbed an ultrasound and an X-ray and began map-
ping the gross anatomy of the Newbie. After half an
hour of building up a reasonable 3-D model in the
data stack, they dragged the heavy corpse into a ring
that looked like it was made of bamboo--probably
some sort of CAT scan or Kronke mapper that the
Fred doctors used.
     Arlene and I kicked back and talked about old sci-fi
movies we had watched. She thought the creature
looked like the aliens in Communion, but I held out
for a giant-size version of the things from E.T. Fi-
nally, an hour and ten minutes into the examination,
Sears and Roebuck suddenly answered, "Yes."
     It took me a moment to figure out they were
answering my original question. "Say again? You're
saying you can revive it?"
     "We can revive them if the other half you find."
"Other half? S and R, this thing was alone under
there . . . that's all there is; it's not a double-entity
like you."
     They stared at me for a few moments, but I'm not
sure they really got it. Sears and Roebuck were Klave,
and the Klave were always paired . . . always paired.
Normally, they couldn't even deal with individuals--
they literally couldn't see them! If you were alone,
they would usually see a phantom second person; if
you showed up as part of a triad--A, B, and C--the
Klave would see three pairs: A and B, B and C, A and
C . . . something we found out before Hidalgo bought
it on the beam-in.
     But Sears and Roebuck was--were?--an ambassa-
dor of sorts, and lately they'd gotten much practice
coping with singles. Even so, sometimes they forgot.
They looked offended and pained. They lugged the
corpse to the operating table and began the process of
first figuring out what had "killed" the Newbie, then
fixing it; that was all it took to revive anything in the
galaxy . . . except a human being.
     Sears and Roebuck spent a long time hunting for
organic damage, finding nothing; at last, they an-
nounced the mystery solved: the Newbie had died of
malnutrition! Evidently, it had been left behind acci-
dentally and eventually ran out of dietary supplement
pills. As its last action, it went and lay down right on
the LZ, hoping to be found and revived, and that was
what nearly got the thing scrunched flatter than an
armadillo on a tank tread. Another few meters to one
side, and splat!
     Alas, that was a tough problem to cure. None of us
had any idea how malnutrition affected Newbies.
Sears and Roebuck did a biochemical analysis and
thought they had isolated the essential nutrients.
They compared them to what you could find on
Fredworld, figuring out what was missing, then they
had to guess what systems that would destroy.
The upshot was that Arlene and I were ordered to
take a hike for a day or two; we spent it exploring the
ship, mapping all the "object-oriented" divisions of
the ultraindividualist Freds. Strange, I never in my
wildest nightmares thought I would be fighting along-
side the ultimate collectivist Klave to defeat the
ultraindividualist Freds! But a Marine is not there to
make policy, just to enforce it.
     We checked back frequently. I wouldn't put it past
Sears and Roebuck to revive the Newbie without
bothering to wait for me and Arlene. But at last they
said they were ready. They had been washing various
organlike objects in a nutrient bath, running a low-
level electrical current through them for two days.
Now they jump-started the hearts with big jolts of
electricity, and the damned thing moaned, flapped its
arms, and sat up--alive again, oo-rah.
     The Newbie slowly stared at each of us, especially
curious about Sears and Roebuck; it made no attempt
to escape, attack, or even step off the operating table. I
guess it figured we were unknown quantities--best
not to rile us just yet.
     The thing started picking up our language from the
moment we revived it. I asked Arlene whether she had
me covered, and the Newbie had all the vocabulary I
used (Arlene, name; you, me, pronouns; covered,
guarded with a gun) and half our language structure
(interrogative, expression) down cold in six seconds. I
started asking it simple questions; after the second or
third one, it was answering in good English, a lot
better than Sears and Roebuck had ever managed to
learn. An hour after reviving, we were having an
animated conversation!
     "What is your name?" I asked.
"Newbies."
     Thanks a lump. "Not you as a species, you as an
individual. . . . What is your name?"
     "Newbies."
I shook my head. There was some sort of confusion,
but maybe it was just the language. "All right,
Newbie, what did you do to the Freds, to the ones who
were here before you?"
     "They were broken, but we couldn't fix them."
"How were they broken?"
     The Newbie stared unanswering for a moment; I
figured he was calculating the time factor. "Eleven
decades elapsed between contacts by the Freds, and
they had not grown to meet the circumstances. We
expected to surrender and seek fixing, but they were
broken and had to be fixed."
     "We found a Fred here who said you destroyed
them, wiped them all off the face of the planet. Why
did you kill him and his buddies?"
     "What is a Fred?"
"A Fred! The Freds!" I waved my arms in exaspera-
tion. "Why did you kill them?"
     "We are not familiar with a Fred. The Freds were
broken; they did not grow to meet the circumstances.
We attempted to fix them, but it was beyond our
capabilities. We eliminated them from the mix while
we studied the problem. The next time we encounter
such a breakage, we shall have grown."
     The Newbie sat rigidly still on the operating table,
arms hanging limply at its sides, almost as if they were
barely usable. Probably the result of being dead and
imperfectly revivified, I guessed. "Do you attempt to
fix all races that don't, um, grow to meet the circum-
stances?"
     "We have never encountered other races before.
Until we grew, we did not realize we were a planet; we
thought we were the world."
     "Why did the Newbies leave you behind?"
"We are the Newbies. We don't understand the
question. We require further growth or fixing."
"Why are you, you personally, still here on Fred-
world? Why aren't you with the Newbies?"
     "Your syntax is confusing us. We are here and we
are there."
     Oh criminey! Another freaking hive culture. The
Klave were bad enough, being able only to see pairs
and powers of two (pairs of pairs of pairs)... now
these Newbies didn't even understand the concept of
an individual member of a species.
     "We must withdraw to consider your information,"
I said. "Newbies, please wait on this table and else-
where."
     "Newbies will wait." The Newbie closed its eyes
. . . and all life signs ceased! The machines giving
their steady thuds with every beat of each heart
(three--one in the groin area, one in the stomach,
and a smaller one circulating blood through the head)
fell silent, and a rasping buzz sounded as respiration
and body temperature plunged.
     I stared. Had something inside the Newbie's stom-
ach moved? I leaned close, staring, then I thought
about that grotesque movie from the late 1900s and
the thing popping out of the chest, so I stepped back
warily. But something inside the Newbie was defi-
nitely on the move; it rippled across the alien's belly
from east to west, slithering around. "Sears and
Roebuck," I called, "did you pick up any large
parasites or symbiotes that might be using the Newbie
as a host?"
     Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, hands on
heads in agitation. "No," they said, "definitely noth-
ing there was that produces such a motion could
produce."
     "Jesus, Fly, what's happening to it? It looks like it's
being eaten alive! Is it dying?" Arlene and I split,
stepping to either side of the Newbie, weapons at the
ready. The snake or worm or whatever it was pressed
up against the Newbie's stomach, bulging out the
flesh; Arlene and I backed up a step, thank God--
when the belly burst, blue-gray Newbie blood or fluid
sprayed across the sickbay, splashing the wall and
even spotting my uniform slightly.
     A gray serpent slithered through the opening . . .
but the true horror was that the serpent had six heads!
Then I blinked, and the scene abruptly changed: it
wasn't a six-headed serpent; it was a tentacle with six
prongs, or "fingers," at the end. It lashed about
uncontrolled for a few minutes, falling limp at last.
The Newbie opened his eyes. "Are you finished
considering our information?" He seemed not at all
perturbed by the new addition to his anatomy; in fact,
he didn't even remark on it.
     I tried to think of a subtle way of asking what the
hell was going on, but Arlene beat me to the line,
demanding, "How the hell did you grow a tentacle out
of your gut?"
     The Newbie looked down in obvious surprise. "We
aren't sure what event has stimulated this growth."
"It'll come to you, I'm sure," I muttered, "but we're
not quite finished considering your information.
Please excuse us."
     The Newbie became rigid again, and its vital signs
dropped away to zero. I stepped back and spoke for
Arlene's ears only--presuming that the Newbie
hadn't evolved super-sensitive hearing in the last five
minutes. "We are in deep, deep kimchee, kiddo."
She looked up and down. "Oh, come on; we can
still take it." Her red brows furrowed, then raised.
"Oh! You mean we Earthlings? Yeep, I hadn't even
thought of that. Damn."
     Newbies, hundreds of millions of Newbies, scour-
ing the galaxy looking for races to "fix," evolving so
rapidly that they were a whole different species from
one battle to the next. Newbies with a violent streak
sufficient to wipe the Freds from the face of their home
planet. Newbies discovering the embryonic human
race, just beginning to poke our noses into the interga-
lactic fray--these were frightening thoughts. Arlene
grimaced and absently tugged at her ear, following her
own agitated turn of thought.
     "Fly, we have to find them. We have to find out
which way they're headed and warn Earth."
     "What is Earth by now? Maybe we deserve wiping
out . . . who knows?"
     Now she turned the brunt of her blue-eyed, icy
anger on me. "I don't think I follow you--Sergeant."
"Just thinking out loud; don't pay any attention.
Course we're going to warn the country, or what's left
of it, whoever's in charge. I just wonder; it's been
two hundred odd years back home; it'll have been
another two centuries before we can get back, maybe
longer, depending on where the Newbies lead us. I
just wonder whether there's still anything left worth
warning."
     I didn't know how much of the conversation Sears
and Roebuck had heard--little, I hoped. I stepped
forward and spoke aloud, rousing the Newbie. "New-
bies, attention please. Take us to your--to the rest of
you, please. Can you do that?"
     It opened its eyes and spoke but did not otherwise
move. "We can take you to us if we have not changed
our plan for exploration. We are going to [unintelligi-
ble], but we do not know where we will go from
there."
     "If we leave now," Arlene whispered in my ear,
"we'll still arrive about forty years after the Newbies
arrived, no matter where it is."
     "Can you give--ah, the Klave bearing and distance
to your location?"
     The Newbie turned to Sears and Roebuck and
spoke in a different language. And the latter re-
sponded in the same tongue! Arlene and I stared at
each other; when had the Newbie learned to speak
Klavish? Then she rolled her eyes and solved the
mystery: "Learned it from the Freds, of course." It
probably wasn't Klavish, actually, just some common
language the two sides, the Hyperrealists and the
Deconstructionists, used for interparty negotiation.
Sears and Roebuck turned back to the local naviga-
tional system. Evidently, in the absence of conflicting
orders from any other section of the ship, any one
station was sufficient to pilot the entire vessel. "Voy-
age taking us another eight of weeks, it will," an-
nounced the pair of Klave. "External times in the
hundred and twenty of years."
     Eight more long weeks . . . God, just what I
wanted. I took a deep breath. "Push the button,
Max," I said. Arlene gave me a swift kick in the ankle.
The lift sequence was bizarre. It took a full day,
much of which was a carefully calculated refueling
that the ship carried out automatically after Sears and
Roebuck programmed the course. Arlene interrogated
the Klave extensively on just how the launch itself
worked, then briefed me, like a good junior NCO.
On their homeworld, the Freds used something
Arlene called a "pinwheel launcher," which she de-
scribed as a huge asterisk in orbit around the planet.
Each limb of the asterisk was a boom with a hook
attached; the diameter of the asterisk, counting the
booms, was something on the order of seven thousand
kilometers!
     The whole pinwheel affair rotated directly opposite
the day-night rotation of the planet. The spokes of the
pinwheel descended from the sky and just kissed the
ground; at that precise point, ground and boom were
moving exactly the same speed and direction ... so
from the viewpoint of a ship on the runway--our
ship--the boom appeared to hesitate motionless for a
moment.
     That was the moment that our ship attached itself
to the boom; in that fraction of a second, the Fred
ship transformed itself from being a member of the
Fredworld system to a member of the pinwheel sys-
tem. Then, as the pinwheel continued to rotate, it
pulled our ship up with it ... gently at first; it felt like
zero-g for a few minutes. Then we felt the centrifugal
tug as we were yanked in a different direction than the
planetary rotation.
     The g force increased rapidly, then just as suddenly,
it decreased as the inertial dampers kicked online.
Still, my stomach flew south while the rest of me went
north, and I longed for the comfortable, familiar
disorientation of mere zero-g! That was a first, I was
absolutely convinced--Fly Taggart longing for free-
fall!
     The pinwheel carried us up and around, then at
perigee, the highest point of our little mini-orbit
around the center of mass of the rotating asterisk, the
ship decoupled, launching us into space. We were
once again at freefall, and I regretted my earlier wish
for it. But the ship immediately started spinning up,
eventually hitting 0.8 g again. Meanwhile, the engines
began to whine and moan and loudly groan, and we
felt the hard backward push that indicated we had
started our long acceleration, prior to the seven-week
drift, culminating with the hard deceleration at the
other end, dropping us into . .. into what?
     It was a frightening thought. And we would have
fifty-eight creeping da