Hour of the Horde

11

The weapons did not warm up quickly. Somewhere in their combined physical and psychic mechanism was some sort of minimum operating level of potency. Until each weapon was warmed by the response of an intelligent mind to a certain value or effectiveness, it would not be capable of working, even if the Center Aliens should unlock the firing mechanism. It was three weeks before they had all the guns on the vessel capable of responding—in theory—when Miles should call upon them for mass fire.

Meanwhile, the actual approaching Silver Horde had been sighted. It was not yet visible on the vision screen in the control room of the Fighting Rowboat, but a pale ring of light circled the spot on the screen where it would first become visible. Even this much was like a stimulant to the twenty-three aboard the Fighting Rowboat. They worked eagerly now with their weapons and the ship—dry-firing, for the weapons remained locked. But that fact made little difference. As far as the feedback of response from weapon to the one man handling it was concerned, the feeling was the same as if he had actually used it against one of the ships of the Silver Horde.

With Miles now in command, they also practiced actually lifting the ship from its platform, running half a dozen light-years out beyond the Battle Line, and there slashing at the computer-created enemy.

The computer element itself was evidently a smaller version of those large calculative mechanisms which they had been taught to understand were possessed by the Center Aliens in their enormous ships. It would be those larger computers which, calculating up until the last moment before the attack of the Horde, would decide whether opposition would be worthwhile or whether it would not be better for the warships assembled here to break up and run, to hide and try to survive—so that they might protect what few worlds were ignored, from stragglers and small hunting parties of the silver invaders. The small computer aboard the Fighting Rowboat, however, would have no hand in this decision. But it could be used like this to program an imaginary attack of the Silver Horde, calling on the crew of the spaceship to repulse it. More than this, it could rate their performance.

In the several weeks that followed that first takeoff, with all guns now operating, in dry-fire at least, the computer aboard the Fighting Rowboat charted a steady increase in the ability and effectiveness of the ship and crew. However, as the line marking their progress mounted on the chart, it began to level off. Soon it became plain that they were approaching a plateau of skill. Miles, Luhon, and Eff sat down together to figure out what might be the problem that was keeping them from progressing further.

“I don’t understand it,” said Luhon, as they sat together in the control room of the ship, in conference. The ship lay on its platform, and the rest of the crew had abandoned their weapons for rest after a long session of dry-firing and simulated battle. “We’ve all handled those weapons at one time or another. You can feel there’s no theoretical limit to the psychic energies those weapons can take from us. There couldn’t be, because whatever we can feed into them, it’s going to be many times multiplied when the full psychic pattern of the total Battle Line locks in and takes over.”

“It’s plain enough,” Eff put in. “It’s not the weapons that’re at fault. It has to be us. For some reason it looks as if we’re reaching the limit of our capabilities. But I don’t believe that.”

“I don’t either,” said Miles thoughtfully. “As I understand it, from the information the Center Aliens put in me when they changed me—check me on this, both of you—any individual’s psychic power is like the power of any one of his muscles. Continual exercise should increase psychic power, just as it increases muscle power. All right, eventually maybe a limit has to be reached, depending on individual capacity, but it doesn’t feel to me that we ought to be reaching ours this quickly. Do you two feel the same?”

“It checks,” said Luhon briefly. His pointed ears twitched restlessly. “If those Center Aliens were halfway decent, we could get in touch with them and ask them what’s wrong. But they wouldn’t be interested in helping us.”

“Maybe they couldn’t,” said Miles thoughtfully.

The other two looked at him curiously.

“What we may be having trouble with”—Miles hesitated—“may be outside their experience. Either because it’s something they’ve never run up against. Or because it’s something they had so far back in their own history that they’ve forgotten what it was like. Look—these Center Aliens can get many more times the effectiveness out of one of those weapons than one of us can. The one I talked to told me that he had more power in himself than all of us on this ship put together.”

“I can believe it,” said Luhon. “But I don’t see any help in knowing that.”

“It suggests something,” said Miles.

“What?” asked Eff.

“Well,” said Miles, “obviously, we’re different from the Center Aliens. Maybe it’s the difference that’s tripping us up. Suppose we ask ourselves just how we are different.”

Eff gave his short bark of a laugh.

“We’re barbarians,” he said. “They told us that.”

“That’s right,” said Miles. “So maybe it’s some barbarian quality of ours that’s getting in the way of our doing better with these weapons.” He glanced from Eff to Luhon and back again. “What do you think?”

“Well,” Luhon began slowly, “we don’t have their knowledge obviously. But as I understand it, it isn’t knowledge that feeds the psychic force. It’s”—again he hesitated—“something like the spirit in the individual.”

“Spirit, that’s it! The whole emotional pattern we have!” said Miles. He looked closely at Luhon. “You see what I think I see, in that direction?”

Luhon’s ears flicked. He stared back without answering.

“I don’t see anything at all,” put in Eff.

“Wait a minute,” said Luhon slowly. “Miles, you mean that something about our emotional pattern is holding us back?” Abruptly he stiffened in his chair. “Of course—they don’t react the way we do! They don’t lose their tempers. They don’t…”

His voice trailed off thoughtfully.

“That’s what I mean,” said Miles. “We get wound up, self-intoxicated on our own emotion, when we fight. The Center Aliens don’t.” He paused and glanced at Eff and Luhon again, holding them both in his gaze. “Maybe our trouble’s just that—intoxication, this battle fury of ours that keeps us from making better use of the weapons.”

“But if that’s it—” Luhon broke off sharply. “What’re we going to do about it?”

“Practice,” answered Miles harshly. “That’s what we can do. Practice using the weapons without getting worked up about it. I know it won’t be easy to do,” he went on as Luhon opened his mouth to speak again, “but we can try—and maybe we can break through what’s blocking us this way.”

“There’s always the possibility,” Eff put in, “that the plateau of effectiveness we’re on is something temporary. Maybe after staying at a constant level for a little while, we’ll break out and start another stretch of improvement.”

“The Silver Horde has already been indicated on the far instruments,” retorted Miles bluntly. “Do you want to mark time and take the chance?”

Eff hesitated, then slowly shook his head.

“You’re right, Miles,” said Luhon. “Time’s too short. We’ve got to experiment. When do you want to try this business of operating the weapons without emotional involvement?”

“Right now,” said Miles evenly. “And I’ll tell you why. Right now we’re all dead tired. It should make it that much easier to damp out our emotional reactions.”

Eff laughed. Luhon spun about and sounded the signal throughout the ship that summoned all crew members to their battle stations. The gray-skinned alien gave the slight body twitch that was his symptom of amusement.

“They’ll enjoy this,” he said. He began announcing Miles’ plan to the ship.

Meanwhile, Miles was calling on the computer element of the little ship for another simulated attack of the Silver Horde. It was not merely the rest of the crew that was weary. He, Luhon, and Eff were weary as well. As he lifted the ship from the platform and headed out into the interstellar darkness, he deliberately relaxed the tension that searching for an answer to their problem had built within him, and he felt weariness flood through him like a depressant drug.

It was several hours before they brought the ship back to her platform and had a chance to examine the computer’s rating of their performance. It was down, of course, from what they had been scoring, but the interesting thing was that it was several points above what the computer calculated it should be with their weariness fed in as part of the performance equation.

Triumph fought with exhaustion within Miles. He heard Luhon’s voice beside him and turned.

“Friend Miles,” said Luhon, his eyes burning into Miles, “I think you’ve found the answer!”

Wearily they straggled off to their bunks. And the whole ship rested.

The next emotionless trial run that they held after that was a fiasco. The rested minds of the twenty-three aboard the Fighting Rowboat could not contain their emotional reactions, and the results were wildly spotty—highly successful in the case of some individuals, disastrous in the case of some others. But they kept at it until they had once again reached the stage of weariness they had reached on the first occasion.

With weariness, the individual performances evened out. But the total performance was still less than their previous best. Stubbornly Miles clung to the possibility that, with practice, they would be able to hold their emotions down and break free of the plateau after sufficient practice.

So it finally turned out. By the time the Silver Horde was close enough to show as a small bright dot in the midst of the control room vision screen, the general performance of the twenty-three was well above the earlier plateau and still climbing.

By the time the Silver Horde was identifiable as a small crescent shape in the control room screen the ship’s computer showed that they had tripled their fighting effectiveness from what it had been at the plateau level.

It was time, thought Miles, for the Center Aliens to be told. Once the Center Aliens saw what the Fighting Rowboat could do, they could no longer reasonably withhold permission for the little ship to join the vessels actually engaging the Silver Horde.

He left word with Luhon of what he intended to do, took the small ship that was parked on the platform, and once more headed in toward the center of the Battle Line.

This time he had not made it even to within sight of the first great globe-shaped ship of the Center Aliens before one of them appeared beside him in the other seat of the little craft he was piloting.

“You have been told once,” said the Center Alien calmly, but with a cold note in his voice, “that you were not to leave the immediate neighborhood of your ship and its platform. Such incursions must cease—”

He broke off abruptly and gazed steadily at Miles.

“Oh, I see,” he went on in the same calm tone. “So you think that this situation now is somehow different?”

“Not only different but entirely new—for you, as well as us!” said Miles.

“No,” said the Center Alien. “That is not possible. It is symptomatic of your lack of knowledge that you think that you might have discovered or produced anything outside our knowledge.”

“We’ve become an effective fighting ship,” said Miles slowly, unyielding. “We only ask you to come and see for yourselves.”

The alien gazed at him for a moment without speaking.

“Suppose this were true,” said the Center Alien. “Suppose that you actually had done the impossible and had qualified for a place among the fighting ships. Do you realize that if you joined in the actual battle, there would be no real possibility your ship could survive even the first contact with the Horde?”

“We understand that,” said Miles.

“But still you want to throw your lives away in a gesture that can have little or no profit for you, let alone for the rest of the galaxy?” replied the Center Alien. “That in itself is a reasonless, emotion-laden reaction to a situation too large for you to comprehend. Since your basic reaction is flawed by emotion, how can any improvement that has come out of it be superior to that emotion?”

Miles opened his mouth, but there was no answer immediately ready to his tongue.

“You see,” said the Center Alien, and under his hands the small boat turned about and began to head back once more toward the end of the line where the Fighting Rowboat waited, “you see yourself how you have stated an impossibility. A creature without wings may practice jumping in the air and flapping his limbs to the point where he can jump higher and flap harder—but this is not flying and never will be.”

Miles found his voice at last. His voice and his argument.

“I see,” he said, “you’re never wrong—not even on a statistical basis?”

“Of course—on a statistical basis, we can be wrong,” answered the Center Alien.

“Then there has to be a chance you’re wrong about us now,” said Miles.

“Of course,” replied the Center Alien, “there is always a chance—but a chance too small to merit practical consideration.”

“Still,” said Miles grimly, “no matter how small that chance is, with the galaxy facing a fight for its life, you owe it to yourself and us at least to examine what we’ve done, to see if even that infinitely small chance may not be fact.”

The Center Alien continued to pilot the little ship onward, back toward the end of the line. But he did not seem to Miles to be thinking so much as communicating with some one or ones elsewhere.

Without warning, Miles found himself no longer in the little ship. Instead, he and a Center Alien in human form, who looked like the same one who had just been sitting beside him in the small craft, now stood in an area—it was hard to call it a room—that was walled and floored and ceilinged with shimmering yellow light. Directly before them in one wall a milky blue and white globe seemed either to float or to spin at an incredible speed.

It hurt Miles’ eyes to watch the globe. He looked away toward the steadily flowing yellow light of the wall, which was more bearable. Swarming in suddenly upon the heightened perceptivity that the aliens had given him came an impingement, a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by many minds. All at once he realized that he was inside—literally inside—one of the huge ships of the Center Aliens.

“You will look at—” The last word said by the Center Alien had meanings beyond the ability of Miles’ mind to grasp. It translated vaguely in his mind as words like “eye” or “window.” But he understood that it was the globe to which the Center Alien referred.

He forced his eyes back to the globe, which caught and held his gaze with a strength and intensity that were so great as to be almost painful. He felt himself, his mind, his memories, everything about him, being some way examined.

For a long moment the examination continued. Then, abruptly, it was over. He found himself free to look again at the yellow, flowing light of the walls, which he did gratefully.

“It’s settled then,” said the voice of the Center Alien beside him. “You will be given the observational test for which you’ve asked.”

Abruptly he was back in the small ship. The Center Alien sat beside him again, and they were still headed back toward the end of the line where the Fighting Rowboat waited on her platform.

No, they were not headed back. Looking sideways at the Center Alien beside him and feeling the emotional response under the illusory appearance of humanity that clothed him, Miles sensed that this was a different individual from the Center Alien who had first picked him up.

Miles opened his mouth to comment on this and then closed it again. They rode in silence back to the platform where the Fighting Rowboat waited.

However, when they left the small ship and Miles started up the ladder into the Fighting Rowboat, he became conscious of the fact that the Center Alien was not following him. Turning about, halfway up the ladder, he saw the Center Alien standing still on the platform about a dozen steps off.

“Go ahead,” said the Center Allen. “I will observe from here.”

Miles went on up the ladder and closed the entrance port of the Fighting Rowboat behind him. The air of tension and excitement within struck him like a physical blow. He stalked rapidly through the lounge and into the control room, where Eff and Luhon were already in their seats. Their faces looked a question at him, but he did not answer that question to them, alone. Instead, he sat down in his own seat before the central console and, touching a communications control, spoke to everyone aboard the ship.

“Calm down,” he said. “All of you, calm yourselves. We can’t put on any demonstration, keyed up the way we are now. I’m giving everybody two minutes to damp down his emotions. Remember we’re under observation here, and we’re going to be judged from the moment we lift off the platform.”

He dropped his finger from the control and sat back limply in his chair, trying to relax. He did not look to either right or left at his two underofficers. Before him on the console, a chronometer marked off those secondlike sections of time which made up intervals roughly analogous to Earth minutes.

As he sat there, Miles could feel his own tension lowering like the red line of the spirit level in a thermometer plunged into ice water on a warm day. Not only that, but—he could feel now—the general air of tension in the vessel was also slipping away. At the end of two minutes those aboard the Fighting Rowboat were almost calm.

Miles touched the controls, and the ship lifted. For a moment he wondered how the Center Alien was going to observe them when they would be light-years out from the Battle Line in intergalactic darkness. But that was the Center Alien’s worry. He dismissed the thought and put his whole mind to handling the craft.

The emotion of the twenty-three aboard the ship had evaporated now. There was left only the hard purpose—the hard, cold purpose—of their intentness on the exercise. The Fighting Rowboat was now a good dozen light-years out in front of the rest of the Battle Line. Miles pressed a control on the console before him. The illusory Silver Horde ships that were the first phase of their battle exercise were produced by the computer on the screen before him and on the screens that were the transparent bubbles enclosing the weapons lining the ship’s sides.

Miles’ hands leaped over the console before him, and the hands of Luhon and Eff followed him on either side as the small ship flung itself against its smaller, imaginary enemies, some fifteen or twenty of the Silver Horde’s scout ships backed up by one of the ships of the Horde’s second line, which was several times as large and with many times the firepower. As they closed with the imaginary enemy under Miles’ direction, the Fighting Rowboat altered direction, using her mobility, which was greater than that of the second-line Horde ship, to keep a screen of Horde scout ships always between herself and the superior weapons of the second-line ship. As she did so, the Fighting Rowboat’s own weapons flashed outward, killing off the enemy scout ships one by one.

Then, when the number of enemy scout ships was down to only four, the Fighting Rowboat turned and fled, having done a maximum amount of damage to the ships she was able to kill, and having held up for a number of precious moments a larger ship that she was not able to destroy. In theory, the Horde second-line ship, delayed in this way, should have been a sitting duck for the larger ships on the galactic side that were able to outgun it. The total effect of the exercise had demonstrated, in theory, an effectiveness in the Fighting Rowboat that was better than three times what she had possessed originally.

Glowing with inner triumph, Miles turned the small vessel back toward the platform. Inside him was a sort of quiet pride for the other twenty-two aboard. Not one of them had broken emotional discipline. They had remained as cool-headed and objective about their fighting as—Miles thought—any Center Alien would have done.

They headed back to their platform, but as they approached it and hovered ready to land on it, something materialized below them.

It was a Horde scout ship.

This had not been in the programmed exercise. But reflex took over. Miles hit the alarm control, even as the Silver Horde scout ship leaped into the air from the platform. A sudden explosion of emotion from the rest of the twenty-three—all coolness forgotten—struck Miles like a physical blow, even as their weapons opened fire on the scout ship.

But even as they commenced to fire, the scout ship vanished—and hanging there in space before them was the small, unprotected figure of the Center Alien who had been observing them. His eyes met Miles’ through the vision screen—and something like a solid blow seemed to strike Miles from within.

It clove through the reflex of white, raging battle fury within him. It froze him, abruptly paralyzed and with a mind suddenly empty of decision. His hand hovered above the controls but did not drop to touch them.

About him, the weapons of the Fighting Rowboat were silent. Miles felt his hands moved then, as if by some outside force.

His fingers descended stiffly on the controls, and he brought the Fighting Rowboat back down onto her berth on the platform.

Looking out through his screen, once they were down on the platform, Miles saw the Center Alien standing where he had stood before, obviously waiting. Miles rose from his seat before the console, turned, and walked out alone. Around him and behind him as he left it, the other twenty-two who manned the ship were silent, still in their places, locked there by the shock of defeat. Miles walked down the corridor, out the now-open hatch, and down the ladder, which had slid itself out as the hatch was opened. He approached the Center Alien and stopped only a few feet from him. His eyes met the eyes in the apparently human face of the Center Alien.

“So you see,” said the Center Alien coldly. “There are stages to the development of a civilized, intelligent race. Once we too were like you. We had the old, savage instincts still in us. But we came to the point where we could deliberately rid ourselves of those instincts—as you would amputate a diseased limb. And then we went on to develop other skills.”

He paused, looking at Miles. Miles could think of nothing to say.

“Naturally,” said the Center Alien, “you have the barbarian’s instinct to fight when you are attacked. But do not confuse that instinct with ability to fight—which, by comparison with ourselves, you do not have.”

He vanished. Miles stood numbly staring at the blank platform where the other had stood.