Futures Past (18 page)

  
But the mud was not the worst by a long shot. The perimeter sprays which maintained a constant protective curtain around the clearing produced a stench that was beyond words. Clean words, anyway. Inside the C.O.'s tent MacFall felt that he could bite chunks out of it, the smell was so strong. That was because, as an extra safety measure, the tent canvas had been soaked with Deedee as well. Some people held that one could get used to the smell of Deedee. MacFall thought that some people lied through their teeth.

  
The colonel looked up from the sheet of paper he had been studying. Under a head of close-cropped, steel-gray hair his face was quite hideous but the eyes looking out of it—soft, kindly but "I'll stand no nonsense" sort of eyes —made the horror of his features seem unimportant. He said briskly, "Sergeant, you know how quickly we were called on to set up this base here. Well, now I know the reason for all the rush." He nodded toward the lieutenant. "You will take a search party and Lieutenant Nolan here to the other side of that hill due west of the base. You will be ready to start in ten minutes. The object of the search—"

  
Was the old man slipping? MacFall thought, incredulous. He said quickly, "Excuse me, sir, but the Mark Eights haven't arrived yet."

  
"And they won't be coming," Colonel Dawson said. "With the exception of two, that is, which are for ambulance duty should you get into bad trouble. No, Sergeant, this time you will use your feet. Now, listen carefully ..."

  
For the first few seconds MacFall was not listening carefully. He was thinking of the Mark Eight, a two-man articulated tank which could crawl through, climb over or float across anything, with mounted optical equipment and Deedee guns capable of detecting and destroying the enemy at anything up to fifty yards. He thought of riding in the relative comfort of a Mark Eight, and then of chipping and pushing a way through the jungle on foot...

  
". . . The Bug ship landed somewhere in this area," the colonel was saying. He drew a small circle on the map before him. "We are here. You will get there as quickly as possible and without advertising your approach or presence until the last possible moment—the latter being one of the reasons for the absence of Mark Eights. You see, there seems to be something unusual about this particular Bug ship. ..."

  
The ship had been detected over the Indian Ocean by Cape Town radar, and finding it there had been sheer luck because all attention had been centered on the Central American area where unprecedented numbers of Bug ships had appeared. But the University observers had seen it and reported its unusually slow rate of descent—no evasive action being attempted at all—together with their deductions regarding its behavior. Colonel Dawson's group had been dispatched immediately from their home base in Rhodesia, and Lieutenant Nolan came from the University complete with special instructions.

 
 
MacFall's job was to get Nolan to the grounded Bug ship. He was to obey the lieutenant implicitly in everything. The colonel stressed the importance of this point so much that MacFall felt slightly angry about it—he had not been made a sergeant for insubordination, had he? The colonel ended by stating that if this operation was a success it might very well mean the end of the war.

  
MacFall thought sourly that he had heard that one before. He saluted and left to form the search party, trying to think of men who were both dependable and who had a spot of dirty work coming because of some recent misdemeanor. MacFall liked to think that he was a fair man.

  
Not quite fifteen minutes later the party passed through the evil-smelling drizzle of the perimeter sprays and into the jungle. Ten men in extended single file, clad from head to toes in tough plastic and hung with machetes, Deedee guns and the special equipment required by Lieutenant Nolan. Corporal Calleria was on point with strict orders to walk silently around rather than hack noisily through obstacles whenever possible, and MacFall and the lieutenant brought up the rear.

  
MacFall was pondering ways and means of using his superior officer with the greatest efficiency, so that the persons of his men and himself would not be endangered by the ignorance—whether of greater or lesser degree—of their commander. They would run enough risks without adding to them unnecessarily.

  
The lieutenant was eyeing the two men ahead of them, MacFall saw. Nolan had noticed that their head and face armor was hanging backward over their shoulders instead of being in position, and his mouth was opening to order them sharply to replace it.

  
MacFall said hastily, "Is this your first time on a jungle patrol, sir?" Tactfully he had refrained from asking was it his, first time out of school, but implied that the lieutenant no doubt had field experience in other theatres.

  
"Uh? Oh, yes," Nolan said, taking his attention off the offending soldiers. "I've been mainly on lab work."

  
"There may be a few tips we could give you, then," MacFall said easily. "Stuff not covered in temperate zone training. For instance, sir, take those two men ahead of us . . ." He went on to explain why they and the others who were out of sight at the moment were not wearing head protection, foolhardy as this seemed.

  
Two minutes later the lieutenant and himself were peeling off their head armor. Free of the sweltering hot, suffocating plastic, Nolan gave a great sigh of relief and knuckled sweat out of his eyes. He looked steadily at MacFall for several seconds, then said, "Thank you, Sergeant."

  
The lieutenant, MacFall realized, might not have much experience, but he was no fool.

  
They trudged on toward the rising ground to the west, Nolan slapping at the mosquitoes which hung in a buzzing cloud around his head. MacFall waved his away rather than trying to kill any of them—he was almost kindly disposed toward the little brutes. As he had just explained to the lieutenant, they made it possible for the men to dispense with some of the smothering, heat-retaining armor —and in the tropics that meant an awful lot—by their mere presence.

  
In some obscure way the teeming insect life of the jungle could sense the approach or presence of the Bugs, that had been proved many times. MacFall thought that a few mosquito bites was a small enough price to pay for the warning system which the vicious little insects furnished.

  
MacFall said in disgusted tones, "This is a lousy war!"

  
It was a stock observation demanding a rejoinder which varied only in the degree of profanity qualifying it. Mac-Fall made it only to start the lieutenant talking so that he could find out what the other had in mind when they found the fallen Bug ship.

  
Nolan slapped himself on the cheek viciously—completely missing the insect which had just bitten him—and winced. He said pedantically "Not lousy, exactly, Sergeant. The species is greatly dissimilar in physical structure and habits—the little we know of them—from the common . . ." He broke off, then ended in more normal tones, "But it's a ... a frustrating war, I agree."

  
MacFall nodded silently, thinking of the ten men ahead of them. Men with the horribly disfigured visages which marked them as veterans of this war, men who had no hope of winning it quickly because their enemy would not stand still and fight, and men who—unlike the warriors of previous conflicts—were hated rather than hero-worshipped by the civilians. Oh yes, a most frustrating war.

  
It was only a year ago that the first Bug ships had landed. They had come down practically everywhere, but seemed to concentrate in tropical and semi-tropical areas. Experts had witnessed many of these landings so that the world knew exactly what was happening to it without the delays which would have caused rumors to grow. MacFall remembered the headlines: WORLD INVADED FROM SPACE! INSECT RACE DESCENDS ON EARTH! they had screamed, playing it up big for laughs. It had been a great joke—at first.

  
Dealing with this "alien threat" would be no trouble at all, it had been thought. But for the little matter of the Bug ability to cross space the Earth technology was vastly superior. It only remained for the secret of the Bug space drive to be learned and the medical people, who had been uneasy about the danger of possible new infections, could have their way and the aliens be destroyed. The procedure was to have been investigate, learn and destroy, but it had not worked out that way. Before anything of importance had been learned—the investigators in ever-increasing numbers became casualties. Some were killed; others blinded and all were horribly mutilated about the hands and face. Very quickly the order of the day became destroy, and hang the investigation!

  
But what was thought at first to be a fairly easy mopping-up operation soon turned out to be a long, frustrating and well nigh impossible task. The superb mass destruction weapons of Earth were completely ineffective against an enemy so small, highly mobile and evenly distributed as the Bugs. Quite literally, a fly swatter was of more use than a hydrogen bomb—more effective even than the hotted-up DDT sprayers which had been developed recently.

  
Taken singly the enemy was not a very terrifying entity. Here in Madagascar he was a silvery-gray, winged insect just under one inch in length. This was not his true coloring, MacFall knew, but that of the protective sheath which the Bugs had developed against the early and milder DDT guns. Nowadays those shells merely slowed the speed with which the Bugs died, because the present Deeded gun shot a spray of insecticide so concentrated that a misdirected burst could blister the skin of the man using it. The Bugs just shriveled up and died. But for the three or four seconds they took to die, they fought.

  
It was hard to believe that mere insects could evolve firearms, but it was so, and in relation to their size those weapons were very powerful indeed. They shot a tiny projectile which, under favorable circumstances, could penetrate human flesh to a depth of half an inch and there explode. The charge they contained equaled that of only a few grains of gunpowder, but exploding as they did inside solid flesh and muscle a few such projectiles could disable or demoralize any man. Placed right—and the Bugs had quickly learned where to place them—they could kill.

  
Forcefully MacFall pushed the memory of what those microscopic bullets could do out of his mind. He ducked to avoid a thorny outgrowth that writhed across their path just at shoulder level, and tried to wipe sweat from his face with a hand that was equally sweaty; in the jungle these plastic coveralls were murder. His fingers ran over the ridges, craters and puckers of scar tissue covering his cheek and jaw and the bristles growing through them. Smooth, he thought sourly, remembering razor blade and shaving soap ads he had read in the days when he could use such things; smooth, like a rocky beach! He increased pace to draw abreast of the lieutenant.

  
Nolan's face was smooth, but not entirely unmarked. There was that technicolored mouse under the lieutenant's eye—a temporary, but still honorable scar of battle.

  
MacFall felt better with a bit of conversation going on, and anyway it was time the lieutenant began telling them what he intended doing. More to start the other talking than anything else, MacFall said, "I see you ran into a door, sir. A civilian door, I suppose?"

  
"One of the students," Nolan said shortly. His lips tightened and he did not appear disposed to elucidate.

  
"But why do they do it?" MacFall asked angrily, ignoring the officer's expression. He felt very strongly on the subject. "Haven't we enough on our hands without civilians picking fights with us, or beating up men on leave, or even throwing rocks at us? Damn it, they're nothing but a pack of lousy quislings who—"

  
"Keep your voice down, Sergeant."

  
"Sorry, sir," MacFall said. They were a good mile away from the spot where the Bug ship was thought to have landed, and his voice had not been raised all that much.

 
 
"You must understand, Sergeant," Nolan said after they had struggled through some more undergrowth, "that the Bug population on Earth is spread pretty thin. It is only when the army makes an effort to clear a certain sector that their activity increases therein—this is natural, they fight back as much as possible before withdrawing to settle somewhere else. It is also natural that civilians in this sector suffer more than usual because of this, and are inclined to blame the army for bringing on this suffering rather than the Bugs. They dislike anybody who is trying to take warlike action against the Bugs."