Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 23

  The pony swore an oath meaningless to anyone who hadn’t been raised on the planet Treebel. It stood up, braced itself, and began pulling its feet out of the mud in a succession of loud, sucking noises.

  “I haven’t had an hour’s straight rest since you talked me into tramping around with you eight years ago!” it complained.

  “But you’ve certainly been seeing life, like I promised,” Grandma smiled.

  The pony slopped in a last, enormous tongueful of wet weeds. “That I have!” it said, with emphasis.

  It came chewing up to the road.

  “I’ll keep a watch on things while you’re having your supper,” it told her.

  AS THE uniformed twelve-man defense unit marched in good order out of the village, on its way to assume a strategic position around the hollow on Grimp’s father’s farm, there was a sudden, small explosion not very far off.

  The Guardian, who was marching in the lead with a gun over his shoulder and the slavering pank-hound on a leash, stopped short. The unit broke ranks and crowded up behind him.

  “What was that?” the Guardian inquired.

  Everybody glanced questioningly around the rolling green slopes of the valley, already darkened with evening shadows. The pank-hound sat down before the Guardian, pointed its nose at the even darker shadows in the woods ahead of them and growled.

  “Look!” a man said, pointing in the same direction.

  A spark of bright green light had appeared on their path, just where it entered the woods. The spark grew rapidly in size, became as big as a human head—then bigger! Smoky green streamers seemed to be pouring out of it . . .

  I’m going home right now,” someone announced at that point, sensibly enough.

  “Stand your ground!” the Guardian ordered, conscious of the beginnings of a general withdrawal movement behind him. He was an old soldier. He unslung his gun, cocked it and pointed it. The pank-hound got up on his six feet and bristled.

  “Stop!” the Guardian shouted at the green light.

  It expanded promptly to the size of a barrel, new streamers shooting out from it and fanning about like hungry tentacles.

  He fired.

  “Run!” everybody yelled then. The pank-hound slammed backward against the Guardian’s legs, upsetting him, and streaked off after the retreating unit. The green light had spread outward jerkily into the shape of something like a many-armed, writhing starfish, almost the size of the trees about it. Deep, hooting sounds came out of it as it started drifting down the path toward the Guardian.

  He got up on one knee and, in a single drumroll of sound, emptied all thirteen charges remaining in his gun into the middle of the starfish. It hooted more loudly, waved its arms more wildly, and continued to advance.

  He stood up quickly then, slung the gun over his shoulder and joined the retreat. By the time the unit reached the first houses of the village, he was well up in the front ranks again. And a few minutes later, he was breathlessly organizing the local defenses, employing the tactics that had shown their worth in the raids of the Laggand Bandits nine years before.

  The starfish, however, was making no attempt to follow up the valley people’s rout. It was still on the path at the point where the Guardian had seen it last, waving its arms about and hooting menacingly at the silent trees.

  “THAT should do it, I guess,” Grandma Wannattel said. “Before the first projection fizzles out, the next one in the chain will start up where they can see it from the village. It ought to be past midnight before anyone starts bothering about the globes again. Particularly since there aren’t going to be any globes around tonight—that is, if the Halpa attack-schedule has been correctly estimated.”

  “I wish we were safely past midnight right now,” the rhinocerine pony worriedly informed her. Its dark shape stood a little up the road from the trailer, outlined motionlessly like a ponderous statue against the red evening sky. Its head was up; it looked as if it were listening. Which it was, in its own way—listening for any signs of activity from the hollow.

  “No sense getting anxious about it,” Grandma remarked. She was perched on a rock at the side of the road, a short distance from the pony, with a small black bag slung over her shoulder. “We’ll wait here another hour till it’s good and dark and then go down to the hollow. The breakthrough might begin a couple of hours after that.”

  “It would have to be us again!” grumbled the pony. In spite of its size, its temperament was on the nervous side; and any companion of Grandma’s was bound to run regularly into situations that were far from soothing. She belonged to a powerful human organization whose activities extended throughout most of those sections of the Galaxy where Terra’s original colonies, and their branch-colonies, and branches of the branches, had grown down the centuries into new and independent civilizations. The role of the organization was that of watchdog for the safety of all, without regard for the often conflicting rulings and aims of individual governments; and sometimes that wider view made it necessary to take some very grim risks locally. Unfortunately, this was one of the times.

  “I’d feel a lot better myself if Headquarters hadn’t picked us for this particular operation,” Grandma admitted. “Us and Noorhut . . .”

  Because, by what was a rather singular coincidence, considering how things stood there tonight, the valley was also Grandma’s home. She had been born, quite some while before, a hundred and eighty miles farther inland, at the foot of the dam of the great river Wend, which had given its name to the land, and nowadays supplied it with almost all its required power.

  Erisa Wannattel had done a great deal of traveling since she first became aware of the fact that her varied abilities and adventuresome nature needed a different sort of task to absorb them than could be found on Noorhut, which was progressing placidly up into the final stages of a rounded and balanced planetary civilization. But she still liked to consider the Valley of the Wend as her home and headquarters, to which she returned as often as her work would permit. Her exact understanding of the way people there thought about things and did things also made them easy for her to manipulate; and on occasion that could be very useful.

  In most other places, the means she had employed to turn the Guardian and his troop back from the hollow probably would have started a panic or brought armed ships and radiation guns zooming up for the kill within minutes. But the valley people had considered it just another local emergency. The bronze alarm bell in the village had pronounced a state of siege, and cow horns passed the word up to the outlying farms. Within minutes, the farmers were pelting down the roads to the village with their families and guns; and very soon afterward, everything quieted down again. Guard lines had been set up by then, with the women and children quartered in the central buildings, while the armed men had settled down to watching Grandma’s illusion projections—directional video narrow beams—from the discreet distance marked by the village boundaries.

  If nothing else happened, the people would just stay there till morning and then start a cautious investigation. After seeing mysterious blue lights dancing harmlessly over Grimp’s farm for four summers, this section of Wend was pretty well conditioned to fiery apparitions. But even if they got too adventurous, they couldn’t hurt themselves on the projections, which were designed to be nothing but very effective visual displays.

  What it all came to was that Grandma had everybody in the neighborhood rounded up and immobilized where she wanted them.

  IN EVERY other respect, the valley presented an exceptionally peaceful twilight scene to the eye. There was nothing to show that it was the only present point of contact between forces engaged in what was probably a war of intergalactic proportions—a war made wraithlike but doubly deadly by the circumstance that, in over a thousand years, neither side had found out much more about the other than the merciless and devastating finality of its forms of attack. There never had been any actual battles between Mankind and the Halpa, only alternate and very thorough massacres—al
l of them, from Mankind’s point of view, on the wrong side of the fence.

  The Halpa alone had the knowledge that enabled them to reach their human adversary. That was the trouble. But, apparently, they could launch their attacks only by a supreme effort, under conditions that existed for periods of less than a score of years, and about three hundred years apart as Mankind measured time.

  It was hard to find any good in them, other than the virtue of persistence. Every three hundred years, they punctually utilized that brief period to execute one more thrust, carefully prepared and placed, and carried out with a dreadfully complete abruptness, against some new point of human civilization—and this time the attack was going to come through on Noorhut.

  “Something’s starting to move around in that hollow!” the pony announced suddenly. “It’s not one of their globe-detectors.”

  “I know,” murmured Grandma. “That’s the first of the Halpa themselves. They’re going to be right on schedule, it seems. But don’t get nervous. They can’t hurt anything until their transmitter comes through and revives them. We’ve got to be particularly careful now not to frighten them off. They seem to be even more sensitive to emotional tensions in their immediate surroundings than the globes.”

  The pony made no reply. It knew what was at stake and why eight big ships were circling Noorhut somewhere beyond space-detection tonight. It knew, too, that the ships would act only if it was discovered that Grandma had failed. But—

  The pony shook its head uneasily. The people on Treebel had never become civilized to the point of considering the possibility of taking calculated risks on a planetary scale—not to mention the fact that the lives of the pony and of Grandma were included in the present calculation. In the eight years it had been accompanying her on her travels, it had developed a tremendous respect for Erisa Wannattel’s judgment and prowess. But, just the same, frightening the Halpa off, if it still could be done, seemed like a very sound idea right now to the pony.

  As a matter of fact, as Grandma well knew, it probably could have been done at this stage by tossing a small firecracker into the hollow. Until they had established their planetary foothold, the Halpa took extreme precautions. They could spot things in the class of radiation weapons a hundred miles away, and either that or any suggestion of local aggressiveness or of long-range observation would check the invasion attempt on Noorhut then and there.

  But one of the principle reasons she was here tonight was to see that nothing did happen to stop it. For this assault would only be diverted against some other world then, and quite probably against one where the significance of the spying detector-globes wouldn’t be understood before it was too late. The best information system in the Galaxy couldn’t keep more than an insignificant fraction of its populations on the alert for dangers like that—

  She bounced suddenly to her feet and, at the same instant, the pony swung away from the hollow toward which it had been staring. They both stood for a moment then, turning their heads about, like baffled hounds trying to fix a scent on the wind.

  “It’s Grimp!” Grandma exclaimed.

  The rhinocerine pony snorted faintly. “Those are his thought images, all right,” it agreed. “He seems to feel you need protection. Can you locate him?”

  “Not yet,” said Grandma anxiously. “Yes, I can. He’s coming up through the woods on the other side of the hollow, off to the left. The little devil!” She was hustling back to the trailer. “Come on, I’ll have to ride you there. I can’t even dare use the go-buggy this late in the day.”

  The pony crouched beside the trailer while she quickly snapped on its saddle from the top of the back steps. Six metal rings had been welded into the horny plates of its back for this purpose, so it was a simple job. Grandma clambered aloft, hanging onto the saddle’s hand-rails.

  “Swing wide of the hollow,” she warned. “Grimp came just as I suggested him mentally to. You needn’t worry about making noise. The Halpa don’t notice noise as such—it has to have emotional content for them to hear it—and the quicker Grimp spots us, the easier it will be to find him.”

  The pony already was rushing down into the meadow at an amazing rate of speed—it took a lot of muscle to drive a body like that through the gluey swamps of Treebel, and there were none here to impede it. It swung wide of the hollow and of what it contained, crossed a shallow bog farther down the meadow with a sound like a charging torpedo-boat, and reached the woods.

  It had to slow down then to avoid brushing off Grandma.

  “Grimp’s down that slope somewhere,” Grandma said. “He’s heard us . . .”

  “They’re making a lot of noise,” Grimp’s thought reached them suddenly and clearly. He seemed to be talking to someone. “But we’re not scared of them, are we?”

  “Bang-bang!” another voice-thought came excitedly.

  “That was the lortel,” Grandma said. “They’re very good for giving children courage. Much better than Teddy Bears.”

  “That’s the stuff,” Grimp resumed approvingly. “We’ll slingshot them all if they don’t watch out. But we’d better find Grandma soon.”

  “Grimp!” shouted Grandma. The pony backed her up with a roaring call.

  “Hello?” came the lortel’s thought.

  “Wasn’t that the pony?” Grimp asked it, getting only another “hello” in reply. “All right, we’ll go that way,” he added, as though they had reached a joint decision.

  “Here we come, Grimp!” Grandma shouted, and the pony descended the steep side of a ravine with the straightforward technique of a rock slide.

  “That’s Grandma!” thought Grimp. “Grandma!” he yelled. “Look out, there’s monsters all around!”

  “WHAT you missed!” yelled Grimp, dancing around the pony as Grandma Wannattel scrambled down from the saddle. “The monsters have the village surrounded, and the Guardian killed one and I slingshot another till he fizzled out, and I was coming to find you—”

  “Your mother will be worried,” said Grandma as they rushed into each other’s arms.

  “No,” grinned Grimp. “All the kids are supposed to be sleeping in the school house, and she won’t look there till morning, and the teacher said the monsters were all holynations—ho-lucy-nations. But he wouldn’t go look when the Guardian said they’d show him one. He stayed right in bed! But the Guardian’s all right—he killed one, and I slingshot another one and the lortel learned a new word. Say ‘bang-bang,’ lortel!”

  “Hello!” squeaked the lortel. “Aw, he’s scared,” said Grimp disappointedly. “He can say it, though. And I’ve come to take you to the village so the monsters don’t chase after you. Hello, pony!”

  “Bang-bang,” said the lortel distinctly.

  “See?” cried Grimp. “He wasn’t scared, after all—he’s a real brave lortel! If we see some monsters, don’t you get scared, either, because I’ve got my slingshot,” he said, waving it bloodthirstily, “and two back pockets all full of real big stones. I just hope my pants stay up. But that doesn’t matter—the way to do it is to kill them all.”

  “It sounds like a pretty good idea, Grimp,” Grandma agreed. “But you’re awfully tired now.”

  “No, I’m not!” Grimp said, surprised. His right eye sagged shut and then his left. He opened them both with an effort and looked at Grandma. “I can stay awake all night, I bet,” he argued drowsily. “I am—”

  “In fact,” said Grandma, “you’re asleep.”

  “No, I’m n—” objected Grimp. Then he sagged toward the ground, and Grandma caught him firmly.

  “In a way, I hate to do it,” she panted, wrestling him aboard the pony, which had hunkered down and flattened itself as much as it could to make the job easier. “He’d probably enjoy it. But we can’t take a chance. He’s a husky little devil, too,” she groaned, giving a final boost, “and those ammunition pockets don’t make him any lighter.” She clambered up again behind him and noticed that the lortel had transferred itself to her coat collar.
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br />   The pony stood up cautiously.

  “Now what?” it asked.

  “Might as well go straight to the hollow,” said Grandma, breathing hard. “We’ll probably have to wait around there a few hours, but if we’re careful it won’t do any harm.”

  “DID you find a good deep pond?” Grandma asked the pony a little later, as it came squishing up softly through the meadow behind her to rejoin her at the edge of the hollow.

  “Yes,” said the pony. “About a hundred yards back. That should be close enough. How much more waiting do you think we’ll have to do?”

  Grandma shrugged carefully. She was sitting in the grass with what, by daylight, would have been a good view of the hollow below. Grimp was asleep with his head on her knees. The lortel, after catching a few bugs in the grass and eating them, had settled down on her shoulder and dozed off, too.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s still three hours till Big Moonrise, and it’s bound to be some time before then. Now that you’ve found a waterhole, we’ll just stay here together and wait. The one thing to remember is not to let yourself start getting excited about them.”

  The pony stood huge and chunky beside her, staring down, its forefeet on the edge of the hollow. Muddy water trickled from its knobby flanks. It had brought the warm mud-smells of a summer pond back with it to hang in a cloud about them.

  There was vague, dark, continuous motion at the bottom of the hollow. A barely noticeable stirring in the single big pool of darkness that filled it.

  “If I were alone,” the pony said, “I’d get out of here! I know when I ought to be scared. But you’ve taken psychological control of my reactions, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Grandma. “It’ll be easier for me, though, if you help along as much as you can. There’s really no danger until their transmitter has come through.”

  “Unless,” objected the pony, “they’ve worked out some brand-new tricks in the past few hundred years.”