The Cold Equations (48 page)

Subterfuge!
The foreknowledge of the snake's intention was an electric shock through the haze of pain and sickness.
Subterfuge
—it was trying to put him off guard a little before it snatched the pistol from his hand.

The showdown had come.

He moved with all the desperate quickness his weakness would permit, trying to bring his left hand over in time to help his still-controlled right hand hold onto the pistol. The movement was hardly begun when the hand of the snake flashed out. At the same moment it ordered with all the force at its command: "
Release the weapon!
"

Susie reacted then, instinctively and instantaneously. It was beyond her ability to understand that the snake wanted only the pistol; that it wanted no contact with her. She had been waiting and watching, her eyes and body coordinated like a perfect machine and ready to act at the lightning-fast instant of her command. The snake-like arm darted toward her, as a rattlesnake would strike, and she replied to its threat as she would to the strike of a rattlesnake. Its hand was yet four inches from the pistol when her paw made its invisibly swift slash and the razor-sharp claws laid the soft-scaled hand open in four long gashes.

It flipped its body back at the slash of her claws and the control was suddenly gone, something like a scream coming through the channel where it had been. It was soundless but it was terror, complete and absolute.

Now!
The glazed yellow belly was before him and the control was gone. He brought the pistol up, spurred by the frantic fear that the snake would resume control when victory was only a split second away. Up, where the sickening glaze was so near him—up and in line— The pistol barked, vicious and savage, and the snake lurched from the impact, a small, round hole in the glaze. Up and fire—up and fire— It was as he had wanted it to be when the snake held him helpless; as he raised the pistol and fired, raised and fired, the little black holes ran up the glazed belly while the snake kept lurching from the impacts and leaning farther backward, out over the edge of the trail. There were six of the little black holes in it when it toppled over and fell into the canyon below.

He heard the thump of it as it hit the bottom and he crawled to the rim of the trail to look down at it. It was lying in the sand of the canyon floor, twisting aimlessly, sometimes the dark green back up and sometimes the glistening yellow belly up.

It was twisting and turning as all dead snakes do; it was going nowhere; it was no longer a menace.

He turned away from it and saw that Susie and all the kittens were lined up beside him, looking down at the thing they had helped kill.

"I think," he said to them, "that the hungry old cat and the scrawny kittens we gave a home to one cold, rainy night have repaid us."

* * *

He was still in the hospital nine months later—with release a month away—when Earth's first spaceship was completed and the christening ceremony held. The snake-thing's ship had possessed every conceivable kind of weapon as well as the hyper-space drive and the military had been given orders, and unlimited priority, to create a Hyperspace Interceptor Fleet. There had been tapes and records in the ship that had left no doubt as to the snake-thing's mission. Industry had combined genius and mass-production to do the impossible; it had turned out the first complete and fully armed interceptor in less than nine months.

Gwen made her daily visit on the afternoon of the day of the ship's christening.

"This one will be the flagship, I guess you'd call it," she said. "Now that they're tooled up for production, they say they'll be turning out a ship a week."

"The things might try again," he said. "I don't think they will for some time; when Susie struck the snake it let its mind go wide open to my own mind for a moment—not only its mind but I could sense the thoughts of the other ones that it was in communication with—and they were
afraid
. Even the others were afraid, afraid because the one here was terrorized by something it couldn't control or understand. I think these snake-things got where they are by pure, unemotional logic; they happened to be an older form of life than the ones on the worlds they conquered and their knowledge of physical things, such as weapons, was greater. I suppose they had plans for ultimately conquering every habitable world in the galaxy. They were utterly without mercy in their plans; they, alone, were entitled to life because they, alone, had developed methods of destroying all other forms of life. They knew all about physical laws and they made use of their knowledge to devise weapons that made them invincible. But they overlooked what I like to think is a law higher than any they knew: the law that no species alone, is entitled to survival."

Gwen smiled at him. "The law that causes people to feel sorry for lost and hungry dogs and cats and want to give them a home. It's a good law, and it doesn't have to be written down for people; it's just our nature like it was the nature of that snake-thing to be cold and logical in everything it did."

"And its cold logic caused it to die," he said, "with it, even as it died, still wondering at our illogical affection for other creatures. And speaking of other creatures; how is Susie taking all the publicity and fame?"

"She's completely unphotogenic, and bewildered besides. She just wants to keep on being a common cat and she can't understand why all those people keep coming to see her and take her picture."

"Well—after all, she can't know just how important was the thing she and the kittens did. That thing was a snake and she was a cat; she just did the usual, normal thing for a cat to do."

"She was wanted at the ship's christening today, too," Gwen said. "They wanted her there to go out over all the television channels. I had to put my foot down flat on the idea, though."

"Why?"

Gwen smiled again. "Because she was too busy today doing something else that is the usual, normal thing for a cat to do—she was having kittens."

Editor's note: The backdrop to all of Godwin's stories is a universe which is cold and pitiless. More so than any demon, because it is a lack of mercy which stems from the fact that the universe simply does not care. Technical advances, whatever their benefits, do not fundamentally change that bleak reality. In different ways, that theme stands at the center of the last two stories in this anthology. 

He was dying! 

The fear flooded over him again, dark and smothering and made worse by his inability to move. His doctor was standing near him, watching over him with dark, patient eyes, knowing that he was dying. When a man is dying, there should be comfort in the presence of a doctor who knows how to save his life. His doctor knew he was dying and had already done the thing that should have saved him from death; the doctor had informed the pilot of his condition by means of the letters on the pilot's communications panel. They had leered at him for an endless eternity: OBSERVER DYING OF EFFECTS OF FULL ACCELERATION. IMMEDIATE REDUCTION OF ACCELERATION IS SUGGESTED.

His doctor watched him die with dark, brooding eyes and suggested to the pilot that the acceleration be reduced. 

But the pilot's seat was empty. 

He was the pilot, and the doctor knew it . . .  

Lieutenant Knight flattened himself behind the outcropping on the windswept ridge and raised his head to stare across the small basin at Hill 23, looming red-scarred and forbidding in the Korean rain; deceptively, ominously quiet, as though daring Company C to resume its vain battering at it.

"Don't look dangerous, does it?" Sergeant Wenden asked, his bush of black and gray beard close to the ground as he crawled up beside Knight. "Real calm and peaceful. Good old Hill Twenty-three—all we gotta do is take it."

The blue of the Pacific gleamed beyond Hill 23; if they could take the hill it would destroy one of the last remnants of one of the last enemy beachheads on the Korean coast. It would not be difficult—if Cullin would only wait another day until Company B came up.

"I have an idea they won't want to give that hill up," the sergeant went on. "It's their last one; their backs are to the sea and they're goin' to argue about givin' it up."

Knight did not answer, studying the terrain of the hill and the basin that lay between; planning the best route for the Fourth Platoon, the best way to give them a fighting chance.

"Yep, real calm and peaceful," the loquacious sergeant repeated. "I wonder if their snipers know we're lookin' over the ridge at 'em?"

His answer came a half second later; a spurt of rock dust as a bullet struck between them, and a shrill scream as it ricocheted away.

"Reckon they do," he grunted, dropping his whiskers low and scuttling backward from the crest of the ridge. Knight followed, and they slid to the bottom of the small gulch that ran behind the ridge.

"Of course," the talkative sergeant remarked philosophically, biting off a chew of tobacco, "bullets'll be snappin' all around us in another hour, but there ain't no reason to invite one of 'em to hit us any sooner than it has to."

Knight started back down the muddy gulch and the sergeant tramped beside him, paying no attention to his silence. "The other guys are about ready to call this war a draw, I hear. Except for Korea, here, neither us nor them is makin' any headway and they say the chances of an armistice is real good. I hope so; I've had all the war I want and I've already got it figgered out how I'm gonna settle down in Florida and raise chickens—or somethin'. Wish they'd declare the armistice right now—they're dug in on that hill and the Fourth is goin' to have one hell of a time tryin' to be the decoy and draw their fire and not all of us get killed." He scowled at Knight, his philosophical attitude turning to wrath. "A lot of men are goin' to die real soon, and for no reason. Company B will be up tonight—why can't we wait until tomorrow?"

Knight shrugged. "Orders."

"Yeah—orders!" The sergeant snorted disgustedly. "Our Captain Cullin wants
his
company to take that hill
today
, then he can tell battalion headquarters to not bother about sendin' up any support, that he done took the hill all by himself. Then, he figgers, regimental headquarters will be so impressed by his ability to do so much with so few men that they'll recommend he be raised to major. And
then
"—the sergeant spat viciously—"he'll have a whole battalion to give orders to, 'stead of only a company!"

Knight half heard the sergeant as they walked along, his thoughts occupied with the suicidal role his men would have to play. They would be the decoy, as the sergeant had said, deliberately and perhaps fatally drawing the concentration of enemy fire upon themselves.

" . . . I'm a Regular Army man," the sergeant was saying. "I've been in this game for thirty years, but I ain't never seen an officer like Cullin. All he thinks about is himself and his own glory. He made it plain to us what he was when he took over this company. 'A soldier is only as good as his ability to obey orders,' he says. 'You men are going to
be
soldiers,' he says, 'and there will be no questioning of any order given you. I want, and I shall have, absolute obedience and discipline,' he says—"

Decoy. 

It would be senseless, needless slaughter of the Fourth Platoon. It would enable the rest of the company to take the hill but the premature attack was not necessary; the enemy had their backs to the Pacific and they could retreat no farther. They could retreat no farther and they certainly would not dare attack.

Why had Cullin chosen the Fourth Platoon as the decoy? Was it because of the hatred between himself and Cullin? The Fourth was
his
platoon; by sending it on a suicide mission Cullin could add the savor of revenge to the sweet taste of glory.

The Fourth was his platoon, and between himself and the men of the Fourth was the bond that months of common danger had welded; the bond of brothers-in-arms that is sometimes greater than that of brothers-by-blood. They did not give his gold second-lieutenant's bars any parade-ground respectful salutes; instead, they respected him as a man, as Blacky who slogged through the mud and rain beside them, who ate the rations they ate, who knew their names and moods, who was one with the hard veterans of combat and the nervous young replacements. Not Lieutenant Knight; just Blacky, to whom someone would sometimes come on the eve of battle and say: "This address here—it's Mary's. If I'm not so lucky this time, I wish you would write her a few words. Just tell her I wanted to see her again but that I . . . well, just say that I said . . . that I said—Aw, hell, Blacky—you'll know what to say."

He would sit by the light of a gasoline lantern in the nights following the battle and write the letters; not alone for the one who had asked him to but for all who had been "not so lucky." They were hard to write, those letters. Soon, now, if he, himself, were not among those not so lucky, he would have more of them to write—far more than ever before.

" . . . What would you say caused it, Blacky?" the sergeant was asking.

"What?" Knight brought his mind back to the present. "How was that?"

"I say, you take a man like Cullin—what do you reckon makes him act that way? You oughta know—you knowed him when you was both kids, didn't you?"

"I've known him most of my life, from the time we were each six years old," Knight answered. "He was always a lot like he is now—even as a kid he wanted to boss the other kids and make them do things for him. I don't know why he hasn't matured emotionally as well as physically. A psychiatrist might be able to trace it back to something—I'm a computer engineer, misplaced in the infantry, and not a psychiatrist."

"Well, if I was one of these psychiatrists, I'd sure ask him if he didn't once have a set of wooden soldiers he liked to play with better than anything else. That's the kind of soldiers he wants us all to be—wooden dummies that don't dare move unless he says to."

They came to the mouth of the gulch and Knight stopped beside a splintered tree. "I have to go over to where he has his headquarters for a last-minute briefing," he told the sergeant. "It's a little over an hour, yet, so everybody might as well take it easy till then. I'll be along in a few minutes."