Clans of the Alphane Moon (16 page)

As he started to turn his car around, something rumbled and clanked past him, heading toward Hamlet Hamlet; it was a crawling monster if not a super-monster. Cast of high-process iron as only the Manses knew how to bring off, sweeping the landscape ahead with its powerful lights, it advanced flying a red and black flag, the battle symbol of the Manses.

Evidently he was seeing the initial stages of a surface counterattack. But against precisely what? The Manses were certainly in action, but surely not against Hamlet Hamlet. Perhaps they had been attempting to reach the small, swift ship before it took off. But for them, as for himself, it was too late.

He honked his horn. The turret of the Mans tank flopped open; the tank circled back toward him and a Mans, unfamiliar to him, stood up and waved in greeting to him. The Mans’s face was inflamed with enthusiasm; obviously he was hotly enjoying this experience, his military duties in defense of the moon, for which they had prepared so long. The situation, depressing as it was to Baines, had an opposite effect on the Mans: for him it permitted a flowery, bellicose puffing and posturing. Gabriel Baines was not surprised.

“Hi,” the Mans in the tank yelled, grinning broadly.

Baines called back with as little sourness as he could manage, “I see the ship got away from you people.”

“We’ll get it.” The Mans did not lose his cheerfulness; he pointed instead toward the sky. “Watch, buddy. For the missile.”

A second later something flashed overhead; luminous fragments rained down and Gabriel Baines realized that the Terran ship had been hit. The Mans was correct. As usual… it was a clan characteristic.

Horrified, because of his intuition that Annette Golding had been within the ship, he said, “You barbaric, monstrous Manses—” The main debris was descending to his right; slamming his car door he started up the engine, left the road and bumped across the open countryside. The Mans tank, meanwhile, shut its turret and began to follow, filling the night with its screeching clankings.

Baines reached the remains of the ship first. Some kind of emergency parachute device, a huge globe of gas, had sprung from the rear of the ship, letting it down more or less gently; it now lay half-buried in the soil, its tail up, smoking as if—and this horrified Baines still further—it were about to disintegrate; the atomic furnace within had reached, he thought, near-critical mass, and once it went that would be that.

Getting out of his car he sprinted toward the hatch of the ship. As he reached it the hatch swung open; a Terran emerged unsteadily, and after him came Annette Golding and then, with immense technical difficulty, a homogenous yellow blob that flowed to the lip of the hatch and dropped with a plop to the ground below.

Annette said, “Gabe, don’t let the Manses shoot this man; he’s a good person. He’s even kind to slime molds.”

Now the Mans tank had clattered up; once again the turret of the tank popped aside and again the
Mans within raised himself up. This time, however, he held a laser beam, which he aimed at the Terran and Annette. Grinning, the Mans said, “We got you.” It was clear that as soon as he had fully savored his enjoyment he would kill them; the ferocity of the Mans mind was unfathomable.

“Listen,” Baines said, waving to the Mans. “Leave these people alone; this woman is from Hamlet Hamlet—she’s one of us.”

“One of us?” the Mans echoed. “If she’s from Hamlet Hamlet she’s not one of us.”

“Oh,
come on,”
Baines said. “Are you Manses so hopped up that you don’t recognize or remember the common brotherhood of the clans at a time of crisis? Put your gun down.” He walked slowly back to his parked car, not taking his eyes from the Mans. In the car, under the seat, he had his own weapon. If he could get his hands on it he would use it on the Mans to save Annette’s life. “I’ll report you to Howard Straw,” he said, and opening the car door groped within. “I’m a colleague of his—I’m the Pare rep to the council.” His fingers closed over the butt of the gun; he lifted it out, aimed it and at the same time clicked off the safety.

The click, audible in the still night air, caused the Mans in the tank instantly to swivel; the laser beam was now pointed at Gabriel Baines. Neither Baines nor the Mans said anything; they faced each other, not moving, not firing—the light was not adequate and neither could make out the other fully.

A thought, emanating from heaven knew where, entered Gabriel Baines’ mind. “Mr. Rittersdorf, your wife is in the vicinity; I’m picking up her cephalic activity. Therefore I advise you to drop to the ground.”

The Terran, and also Annette Golding, both fell at
once on their faces; the Mans in the tank, startled, moved his gun away from Gabriel Baines, peered into the night uncertainly.

An almost perfectly-directed bolt from a laser weapon passed over the prone figure of the Terran, entering the hull of the ruined ship and vanishing in a sizzle of liquefied metal. The Mans in the tank leaped, sought to pinpoint the origin of the shot; he clutched his own weapon in a spasm of instinctive response but did not fire. Neither he nor Gabriel Baines could make out what was happening. Who was shooting at whom?

To Annette, Gabriel Baines shouted,
“Get in the car!”
He held the door open; Annette lifted her head, gazed at him, then turned to the Terran beside her. The two of them exchanged a glance and then both stumbled up and snaked their way swiftly to the car.

In the turret of the tank the Mans opened fire, but not at Annette and the Terran; he was firing into the darkness, in the direction from which the laser bolt had come. Then all at once he popped back down inside his tank; the turret slammed shut and the tank, with a shudder, started up and rumbled forward, in the direction toward which the Mans had fired. At the same time a missile departed from the forward tube of the tank; it went straight, parallel to the ground and then, all at once, detonated. Gabriel Baines, trying to turn his car around, the Terran and Annette in the front seat beside him, felt the ground leap and devour him; he shut his eyes but what was happening could not be closed out.

Beside him the Terran cursed. Annette Golding gave a moan.

Those—Manses, Baines thought savagely as he felt
the car lift, picked up by the shock-waves of the exploding missile.

“You can’t use a missile like that,” the Terran’s voice came very faintly, over the uproar, “at such close range.”

Whipped, carried by the concussion of the blast, the car spun over and over; Gabriel Baines bounced against the safety-padding of the roof, then against the safety-padding of the dashboard; all the security devices that an intelligent Pare would install in his vehicle to protect himself against attack came on automatically, but they were not enough. On and on the car rolled, and in it Gabriel Baines said to himself,
I hate the Manses.
I’ll never advocate cooperation with them again.

Someone, thrown against him, said, “Oh god!” It was Annette Golding; he caught her, hung onto her. All the windows of the car had burst; bits of plastic rained, showering on him and he smelled the acrid stench of something burning, perhaps his own clothing—it would not have surprised him. Now the protective anti-thermal foam spouted in gobs from the nozzles on all sides of him, activated by the temperature; in a moment he was floundering in a gray sea, unable to catch hold of anything… he had lost Annette again. Goddamn, he thought, these protective devices that cost me so much time and skins are almost worse than the blast itself. Is there a moral there? he asked himself as he tumbled in the slimy foam. It was like being lathered up for some great orgy of body-hair cutting; he cringed and gagged, struggled to get free of the sticky stuff.

“Help,” he said.

No one and nothing answered.

I’m going to blow up that tank, Gabriel Baines
thought to himself as he floundered. I swear it; I’ll get back at them, at our enemy, the arrogant Manses… I always knew they were against us.

“You are mistaken, Mr. Baines,” a thought appeared in his mind, calm and sensible. “The soldier who fired the missile did not intend to hurt you. Before he fired he made a careful calculation—or so he believed. You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury. At this moment, he is attempting to reach you and drag you from your flaming car. And those with you as well.”

“If you can hear me,” Baines thought back, “help me.”

“I can do nothing. I am a slime mold; I can’t under any circumstance approach the flames, being too heat-sensitive, as recent events demonstrate clearly. Two of my brethren have in fact already perished trying. And I am not ready at this time to sporify again.” It added, gratuitously, “Anyhow, if I were to try to save anyone it would be Mr. Rittersdorf. There with you in the car… the man from Terra.”

A hand grabbed Gabriel Baines by the collar; he was lifted, dragged from the car, tossed off to one side. The Mans, with typical abnormal physical strength, now reached into the burning car and tugged Annette Golding to safety.

“Next Mr. Rittersdorf,” the slime mold’s anxious thoughts came, reaching Gabriel Baines where he lay.

Once more, with complete disregard for his own safety—also typical of the hyperactive temperament—the Mans disappeared into the car. This time when he returned he was pulling the Terran out.

“Thank you,” the slime mold thought, with relief and gratitude. “In exchange for your deed allow me to
give you information; your missile did
not
reach Dr. Rittersdorf, and she and the CIA simulacrum, Mr. Mageboom, are still nearby out of sight in the darkness, seeking an opportunity to fire at you again. So you had better return as soon as possible to your tank.”

“Why me?” the Mans said angrily.

“Because your clan destroyed their ship,” the slime mold thought back. “Hostilities between you and them are overt. Hurry!”

The Mans soldier sprinted for his tank.

But he did not reach it. Two-thirds of the way there he pitched forward on his face as a laser beam appeared from the darkness, touched him briefly and then winked out.

And now we’re going to get it, Gabriel Baines realized wretchedly as he sat wiping the foam from himself. I wonder if she recognizes me, remembers me from our encounter earlier today… and if so, would that cause her to want to spare me—or to kill me sooner?

Beside him the Terran, also named Rittersdorf by some peculiar freak of coincidence, struggled to a sitting position, said, “You had a gun. What became of it?”

“Still in the car. I suppose.”

“Why would she kill us?” Annette Golding gasped.

Rittersdorf said, “Because she knows why I’m here. I came to this moon to kill her.” He seemed calm. “By the time tonight’s over one of us will be dead. Either she or I.” Obviously he had made up his mind.

Overhead the roar of a retro-rocket sounded. It was another ship, a huge one, Gabriel Baines realized, and he felt hope; possibly they had a chance of escaping
from Dr. Rittersdorf—who certainly, as he had suspected, was deranged—after all. Even if the ship contained Terrans. Because it was so clear that Dr. Rittersdorf was acting out a feral impulse of her own, without official sanction. At least he hoped so.

A flare burst above them; the night became white and everything, each small object down to the stones on the ground, stood out with august clarity. The wrecked ship of Mr. Rittersdorf, the abandoned tank of the dead Mans, the corpse of the Mans himself, sprawled not far off, Gabriel Baines’s car, burning itself into a clinker, and there, a hundred yards away, a vast molten, seething pocket where the missile had exploded. And—among trees to the far right, two human figures. Mary Rittersdorf and whoever else the slime mold had said. Now, too, he saw the slime mold; it had taken refuge near the wrecked ship. In the light of the flare it was a macabre sight; he suppressed an impulse to heehaw.

“A Terran warship?” Annette Golding said.

“No,” Rittersdorf said. “Look at the rabbit on its side.”

“A rabbit!” Her eyes widened. “Is it a race of sentient rabbits? Is there such a thing?”

“No,” the slime mold’s thoughts came to Gabriel Baines. With seeming regret the slime mold said, “This apparition is Bunny Hentman, searching for you, Mr. Rittersdorf. It was, as you anticipated pessimistically, a relatively easy guess on his part that you came here to Alpha III M2; he left Brahe City shortly after you departed from Terra.” It explained, “I am just now obtaining these thoughts from his mind; of course up to now I have been ignorant of this, being in the spore stage only.”

I don’t understand this, Gabriel Baines said to himself. Who in god’s name is Bunny Hentman? A rabbit deity? And why is he looking for Rittersdorf? As a matter of fact he was not even certain who Rittersdorf was. Mary Rittersdorf’s husband? Her brother? The whole situation was confused in his mind and he wished he were back at Adolfville, in the prepared security positions which his clan had elaborated over the years for just such abominations as this.

Evidently, he decided,
we are doomed.
They are all ganged up against us—the Manses, Dr. Rittersdorf, the fat ship overhead with its bunny totem painted on its side, and, somewhere nearby, the Terran military authorities waiting to move in… what chance do we have? A massive clot of defeatism rose up within him—and well it might, he thought grimly.

Leaning toward Annette Golding, who sat weakly trying to shake the anti-thermal foam from her arms, he said, “Good-by.”

She looked at him with large, dark eyes. “Where are you going, Gabe?”

“What the heck,” he said bitterly, “does it matter?” They had no chance here, caught by the flare, in sight of Dr. Rittersdorf and her laser beam—the weapon which had already killed the Mans soldier. He rose unsteadily to his feet, slopping off foam, shaking himself like a wet dog. “I’m leaving,” he informed Annette, and then he felt sad, because of her; not his own death but hers—that was what distressed him. “I wish I could do something for you,” he said, on impulse. “But that woman is insane; I know firsthand.”

“Oh,” Annette said, and nodded. “It didn’t go well, then. Your plan regarding her.” She glanced at Rittersdorf, then, covertly.