Hour of the Horde

4

The process by which Miles was whirled away after that to the university hospital, where they left Marie sleeping, to the airport, by jet to Washington, by blue civilian sedan there to a large building which he dimly recognized as the Pentagon, and within the Pentagon to a suite of rooms more resembling a hotel suite than anything else—all this passed like the successive shapes of some bad dream. And after all the rushing was over, after he had at last been settled in the suite of rooms, he discovered that he had nothing to do but wait.

The two men who had picked him up in Minneapolis and brought him here stayed with him through the dinner hour. After the dinner cart with its load of clinking empty plates and dirty silverware had been wheeled out again, the two men watched television, with its endless parade of announcers, throughout the evening—the sound turned low at Miles’ request. Miles himself, after prowling restlessly around the room and asking a number of questions to which his guardians gave noncommittal answers, finally settled down with a pencil and some notepaper to while away his time making sketches of the other two.

He had become lost in this, to the point where he no longer noticed the murmur of the television or the passage of time, when there was a knock at his door and one of the guards got up to answer. A moment later Miles was conscious that the man had returned and was standing over him, waiting for him to look up from his sketching. Miles looked up.

“The President’s here,” said the guard.

Miles stared, then got hastily to his feet, putting his sketches aside. Beyond the guard, he saw the door to his suite standing open and a moment later heard the approach of feet down the polished surface of the corridor outside. These came closer and closer. A second later the man Miles had been watching on television earlier that day walked into the room.

In person, the Chief Executive was not as tall as he often appeared in pictures—no taller than Miles himself. Close up, however, he looked more youthful than he appeared in news photos and on television. He shook hands with Miles with a great deal of warmth, but it was something of the warmth of a tired and worried man who can only snatch a few moments from his day in which to be human and personal.

He put a hand on Miles’ shoulder and walked him over to a window that looked out on a narrow strip of grass in what appeared to be a small artificial courtyard under some kind of skylight. The two men who had been with Miles and the others who had come with the Chief Executive quietly slipped out the door of the suite and left them alone.

“It’s an honor…” said the President. He still stood with his hand on Miles’ shoulder, and his voice was deep with the throatiness of age. “It’s an honor to have an American be the one who was chosen. I wanted to tell you that myself.”

“Thank you… Mr. President,” Miles answered, stumbling a little over the unfamiliar words of the title. He burst out then in spite of the urgings of courtesy. “But I don’t know why they’d want to pick me! Why me?”

The older man’s hand patted his shoulder a little awkwardly, even a little bewilderedly.

“I don’t know either,” murmured the President. “None of us knows.”

“But—” Miles hesitated, then plunged ahead. “We’ve only got their word for everything. How do we know it’s true, what they say?”

Again the Presidential hand patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

“We don’t know,” the older man said, looking out at the grass of the artificial courtyard. “That’s the truth of the matter. We don’t know. But that ship of theirs is something—incredible. It backs up their story. And after all, they only want—”

He broke off, looked at Miles, and smiled a little apologetically.

Miles felt a sudden coldness inside him.

“You mean,” he said slowly, “you’re ready to believe them because they want only one man? Because they want only me?”

“That’s right,” said the Chief Executive. He did not pat Miles on the shoulder now. He looked directly into Miles’ eyes. “They’ve asked for nothing but one man. And they’ve shown us some evidence—shown us heads of state, that is—some physical evidence from the last time the Horde went through the galaxy millions of years ago. We’ve seen the dead body of one of the Horde—preserved, of course. We’ve seen samples of the weapons and tools of the Horde. Of course, these could have been fakes—made up just to show us. But, Miles—” He paused, still keeping Miles’ eyes locked with his own. “The best guess we can make is that they’re telling the truth.”

Miles opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, helplessly.

Finally, he got the words out.

“But,” he said, “if they’re lying…”

The President straightened. Once more he put his hand on Miles’ shoulder, in a curious touch—a touch like an accolade, as if he were knighting Miles.

“Of course,” he said slowly, “if it should turn out to be that… your responsibility might turn out to be even greater than it is.”

They stood facing each other. Suddenly Miles understood—just as in the same moment he understood that it was just this message that the other man had come personally to give him. It was clear, if unspoken, between them. Yet Miles felt a strange, angry need to bring the understanding out in the open. A need to make it plain the thing was there, like touching with his tongue, again and again, the exposed root of an aching tooth.

“You mean, if it turns out that they want to make me into something dangerous to people back here,” he said, “you want me to do something about it, is that it?’

The President did not answer. He continued to look at Miles and hold Miles’ shoulder as if he were pledging him to some special duty.

“You mean,” said Miles again, more loudly, “that if it turns out that I’m being made into something dangerous to… the human race, I’m to destroy myself. Is that it?”

The President sighed, and his hand dropped from Miles’ shoulder. He turned to look out at the grass in the courtyard.

“You’re to follow your own judgment,” he said to Miles.

A great loneliness descended upon Miles. A chilling loneliness. He had never felt so alone before. It seemed as if the President’s words had lifted him up and transported him off, far off, from all humanity into an isolated watchtower, to a solitary sentry post far removed from all the rest of humanity. He too turned and looked out at the little strip of grass. Suddenly it looked greener and more beautiful than any such length of lawn he had ever gazed upon in his life. It seemed infinitely precious.

“Miles,” he heard the older man say.

He lifted his head and turned to see the President facing him once more, with his hand outstretched.

“Good luck, Miles,” said the President.

“Thank you.” Miles took the hand automatically. They shook hands, and the Chief Executive turned and walked away across the room and out the door, leaving it open. The two Treasury agents who had picked up Miles originally came back in, shutting the door firmly behind them. They sat down again without a word near the TV set and turned it on. Miles heard its low murmur again in his ear.

Almost blindly, he himself turned and walked into one of the two bedrooms of the suite, closing the door behind him. He lay down on the bed on his back, staring at the white ceiling.

He woke suddenly—and only by his waking was he made aware of the fact that his drifting thoughts had dwindled into sleep. Standing over him, alongside the bed, were two figures that were vaguely familiar, although he could not remember ever having seen them before in his life. Slowly he remembered. They were the two figures, still business-suited, that had been shown on the television screen as he and Marie had watched the President’s broadcast in the bar. Suddenly he understood. These were the two aliens from the monster ship that overhung Earth, under a sun that they had colored red to attract the attention of all the people on the world to the coming of that ship.

Reflex, the reflex that brings an animal out of sound sleep to its feet, brought Miles to his. He found himself standing almost between the two aliens. At close range their faces looked directly into his, no less human of feature or color or general appearance than they had looked before. But this close, it seemed to Miles that he felt an emanation from them—something too still, too composed to be human. And yet the eyes they fixed upon him were not unkind.

Only remote, as remote as the eyes of men on some high plateau looking down into a jungle of beasts.

“Miles,” said the one on his left, who was slightly the shorter of the two. His voice was a steady baritone—calm, passionless, distant, without foreign accent. “Are you ready to come with us?”

Still fogged by sleep, still with his nerves wound wire-tight by the animal reflex that had jerked him up out of slumber, Miles snapped out what he might not have said without thinking, otherwise.

“Do I have a choice?”

The two looked steadily at him.

“Of course you have a choice,” said the shorter of the two calmly. “You’d be no good, to your world or to us, unless you wanted to help us.”

Miles began to laugh. It was harsh, reflexive laughter that burst from him almost without intention. It took him a few seconds to get it under control, but finally, he did.

“Want to?” he said—his real feelings bursting out in spite of himself. “Of course I don’t want to. Yesterday I had my own life, with its future all planned out. Now the sun turns red, and it seems I have to go to some impossible place and do some impossible thing—instead of what I’ve been planning and working toward for five years! And you ask me if I want to!”

He stared at them, checking just in time the bitter laughter that was threatening to rise inside his throat again. They did not answer.

“Well?” he challenged. “Why should I want to?”

“To help your race live,” answered the shorter one emotionlessly. “That’s the only reason that will work. If you don’t want that, then we’ve been wasting our time here—and time is precious.”

He stopped speaking and gazed at Miles. Now it was Miles’ turn to feel that they were waiting for him to say something. But he did not know what to say.

“If you don’t want to be your people’s representative in the fight against the Horde,” said the shorter one, slowly and deliberately as if he were spelling matters out for Miles, “you should tell us now, and we will leave.”

Miles stared at him.

“You mean”—Miles looked narrowly at him—“you wouldn’t choose somebody else?”

“There’s no one else to choose,” said the shorter one. “No one, that is, who’d be worth our time to work with. If you don’t want to go, we’ll leave.”

“Wait,” said Miles, as the two turned away. They stopped and turned back again.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” said Miles. “It’s just that I don’t understand anything about all this. Don’t I have a right to have it explained to me first?”

“Of course,” answered the taller one unexpectedly. “Ask us whatever you want to know.”

“All right,” said Miles. “What makes me so different from everybody else in the world, to make you pick me?”

“You have a capability for identification with all the other people in your world,” answered the short one, “that is far greater than that of anyone else alive on that world at this present moment.”

“Understand, we don’t say,” put in the taller one, “that at the present moment you’ve got this identification. We only mean that the capacity, the potential to have it, is in you. With our help that potential can be developed. You can step forward in this ability to a point your own race won’t reach for many generations from now, under ordinary conditions.”

“Your race’s representative against the Horde has to have this identification,” said the shorter one. “Because you’re going to need to draw upon their sources of—” he hesitated, and then went on—“of something that they each possess so far only in tiny amounts. You must combine these tiny amounts in yourself, into something large enough so that you can effectively operate the type of weapon we will be giving you to use against the Horde.”

He stopped speaking. For a moment Miles’ mind churned with the information that had been given him. It sounded sensible—but he felt unexpectedly stubborn.

“How do I know this is all going to be for the benefit of human beings anyway?” he asked. “How do I know that it’s not a case of our not being in danger at all—but your needing me and whatever this thing is that everybody has a little bit of just for your own purposes?”

Their faces did not change as they gazed at him.

“You’ll have to trust us on that point,” said the taller one quietly.

“Tell me one thing then,” said Miles, challenging him. “Do you really look just like human beings?”

“No,” said the smaller one, and the word seemed to echo and reecho in the room. “We put on this appearance the way you might put on a suit of clothes.”

“I want to see you the way you actually are,” said Miles.

“No,” said the shorter one again. “You would not like what you saw if we showed you ourselves as we are.”

“I don’t care,” said Miles. He frowned. “I’m an artist. I’m used to looking at things objectively. I’ll make it a point not to let whatever you look like bother me.”

“No,” repeated the shorter one, still calmly. “You think you wouldn’t let it bother you. But it would. And your emotional reaction to us would get in the way of your working with us against the Horde, whether or not you believe it now.”

“Fine! I have to trust you!” said Miles grimly. “But you don’t trust me!”

“Trust us or not,” said the taller one. “If your world contributes a representative to the galaxy’s defense, that will entitle it to whatever protection all our galaxy’s defensive forces can give it. But your contribution is tiny. In the civilization from which we two come anyone, such as I or my friend here, can operate many weapons like the one you’ll be given to handle. In short, one of our people has fighting abilities worth many times that of the total population of your world. So to us it’s a small matter whether you join us or not. Your help counts—because the slightest additional bit of strength may be enough to swing the balance of power between the Horde and ourselves. But it is small to us, no matter how big it seems to you.”

“In short,” put in the smaller one, “to us you represent a fraction of a single individual defender like myself against the Horde. To yourself, you represent several billions of your people. The choice is up to you.”

“If we’re just one isolated little world, way out here,” said Miles, with the uneasy suspicion that he was clutching at straws, “and not worth much, why should the Horde bother with us at all? If there are so many of you worth so much more in toward the center of the galaxy?”

“You have no understanding of the numbers and rapacity of the Horde,” said the smaller one. “Suppose we show you a picture.”

Instantly the room was gone from around Miles. He stood in the midst of dirt and rock—an eroded desert stretching to the horizon. Nowhere was there an intelligent creature, an animal—or even any sign of a bush, or tree, or plant. There was nothing—nothing but the raw surface of a world.

Suddenly he was back in the room again.

“That is what a world looks like after the Silver Horde has passed,” said the shorter one. “That was a picture taken by those few who survived of the race that held the center of this galaxy before us, several million years ago. The Horde broke through then and processed everything organic for food. Its numbers are beyond your imagining. We could give you a figure, but it would have no real meaning for you.”

“But,” said Miles suddenly and sharply, “if the Horde came through the last time and cleaned off all the worlds like that which had life on them, how is it there are records like this?”

“We’ve never said that all of the galaxy’s worlds would be ravaged by the Horde,” said the taller one. “Some small percentage will escape by sheer chance. Even if we fight and lose, some of the ships that oppose them will escape, even from battle with the Horde. And these will begin to populate the galaxy again. So it was the last time, a million of your years ago, when the Horde came through. Those who lived here before us in the galaxy’s center met them, as we will meet them, and fought them and lost. For a million years after that, the Horde fed its numbers on the living worlds of our galaxy until the pickings became so lean they were forced to move on. But as I say, some ships eluded them. Here and there a world was missed. After the Horde had passed, civilization began over again.”

“And in the millions of years that have passed since,” said the other, “even the ravaged worlds began to recover. Look at that same world again, the one we showed you. See it as it is today.”

Once more Miles found himself standing in some other place than in the room at the Pentagon. Only, about him now were hills covered with a species of grass and a type of tall, twisted tree. Distantly, there were sounds as of small birds chittering, and something small and almost too fast for him to see scurried through the grasslike ground cover perhaps thirty feet from where he stood. Then, abruptly, he was back in the room again, facing the two aliens.

“All through the galaxy you will find worlds like that,” said the shorter. “Their temperature and atmosphere and the rest of their physical makeup make them entirely inhabitable. But their flora and fauna are primitive, as if it had only been less than a billion years since they cooled from the whirlpool of coalescing stellar dusts and fragments that they were originally. But they are not that young. They’ve simply started over again, from the minute life of their oceans, since the Horde passed.”

“Worlds like that will be available for settlement by your people if you survive the Horde,” said the taller one.

“But even if I go, you say I may make no difference in stopping the Horde,” said Miles. “And if I stay, our world may be one of those that the Horde somehow misses, anyway.”

“This is perfectly true,” said the smaller one. They both looked at him impassively. “But as I said earlier, our time is precious. You’ll have to give us your answer now.”

Miles turned and looked out the bedroom window, which also looked onto the small strip of grass of the interior courtyard. Beyond the strip of grass was a bare concrete wall. He looked at that and saw nothing on it—no mark, no shape. It was nothing but a featureless wall. Equally blank was the reaction he felt within him toward the rest of the world. In spite of what Marie had said, in spite of what these aliens seemed to think, it was not people that mattered to him—but painting.

And then, leaping out of nowhere as if to clutch at his throat and stop his breathing, came a sudden understanding. If his world were wiped out, if his race were destroyed, what would become of his painting?

Suddenly it pounced upon Miles, like a lion from the underbrush, the realization that it was not merely the continuance of his work that was at stake here, but the very possibility of that work’s existing at all. If he should stay here and paint, refusing to go with these two, and then the Horde came by to wipe out his world, and his paintings with it, what good would any of his painting have done? He had no choice. He had to defend the unborn ghosts of his future canvases, even at the risk of never being able to paint them.

He turned sharply to the two aliens.

“All right,” he said. “I’m with you.”

“Very well,” said the shorter one. Miles’ acceptance had not altered the expressions of their faces or the tones of their voices, any more than anything else he had said or done.

“What do I do then?” asked Miles. “I suppose we go to your ship?”

“We are already in the ship,” said the shorter one. “We’ve been in it ever since you agreed to join us.”

Miles looked about him. The room was unchanged. Beyond the little window, the strip of lawn and the far wall of the interior courtyard was unchanged. He turned to see the two aliens moving out of the bedroom into the living room of the suite. He followed them and stopped short. The two Treasury agents were gone, and where there had been a door to the Pentagon corridor there was only wall now. The aliens waited while he stared about him.

“You see?” said the shorter one, after a moment.

“There’s no door,” Miles said stupidly.

“We don’t use doors,” said the aliens. “Soon, neither will you. This suite will be yours until we deliver you to the Battle Line. Now, if you’ll come back into the bedroom, we will begin your development.”

Once more they led the way back into the bedroom. They stopped by the bed.

“And now,” said the shorter one, “please lie down on your back on the bed.”

Miles did so.

“Please close your eyes.”

Miles did so. He lay there with his eyes closed, waiting for further orders. Nothing happened. After what seemed only a second he opened them again. The two aliens were gone.

Outside the bedroom window, night darkness held the courtyard. Darkness was also in the bedroom and filling the aperture of the half-open door to the sitting room. In spite of the fact that he seemed merely to have closed his eyes for a moment, he had a confused impression that some large length of time had passed. An impulse came to him to get up and investigate the situation, but at the very moment that it came to him, it slipped away again. A heavy sort of languor crept over him, a soothing weariness, as if he were at the end of some long day of hard physical effort. He felt not only weary, but also comforted. Dimly, he was aware that some great change had taken place in him, but he was too much at ease on the bed, soaked and steeped in his weariness, to investigate now what had happened.

Above all, he felt wrapped in peace. A great silent song of comfort and reassurance seemed to be enfolding him, buoying him up—lifting him up, in fact, like the crest of a wave on an endlessly, peacefully rocking ocean. He mounted the crest and slid slowly down into the next trough. The darkness moved in on him. He gave himself up to the rocking comfort.

Slowly consciousness slipped away from him, and he felt himself falling into a deep but natural sleep.

When he woke a second time, it was once more daylight, or its equivalent, beyond the windows of his bedroom. Daylight—not red, as the daylight had been since the moment of his painting on the river, but cheerful yellow daylight—filled the interior courtyard via the skylight. He looked around the room and saw the two aliens standing side by side not far from the bed, watching him.

Slowly he became conscious of himself. He felt strangely different, strangely light and complete. So lacking in the normal little pressures and sensations was he that he glanced down to see if his body was still there.

It was. He lay on the bed, wrapped or dressed in some sort of metallically glinting silver clothing that fitted him closely, covering all but his hands and his face. His body had never felt this way before. Nor his mind, for that matter. His head was so clear, so free of drowsiness and dullness and all the little hangovers of human tiredness, that his thoughts seemed to sing within it. He looked again at the two aliens.

“You can get up now,” said the smaller.

Miles sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and rose to his feet. The sensation of his rising was indescribable. It was almost as if he floated to his feet without muscular effort. As he stood facing the two aliens, the feeling of lightness in his body persisted. He felt, although his feet were flat on the floor, as if he were standing on tiptoe, with no effort involved.

“What’s happened to me?” he asked wonderingly.

“You are now completely healthy. That’s all,” said the taller alien. “Would you like to take a look at yourself?”

Miles nodded.

He had barely completed the nod when the wall behind the two aliens suddenly became a shimmering mirror surface. He saw himself reflected in it, standing beside the bed wrapped in his close-fitting silver clothes, and for a moment he did not recognize himself.

The man who stood imaged in the mirror was erect and straight-limbed and looked bigger—bigger all over in some strange way—than Miles had remembered his mirror image’s ever looking before. But it was not this so much that caused Miles to catch his breath. There was something drastically different about him now. Something had happened. He stared at himself for a long moment without understanding, and then he saw it. And an icy feeling of excitement ran down his spine.

In the tight silver sleeve that enclosed it to the wrist, his left arm was as large and full-muscled as his right. And the hand that terminated it was in no way different from the healthy hand at the end of his right arm.

Miles stood staring at it. He could not believe what he saw. And then—he could believe it, but he was afraid that if he looked away from it for an instant, what he saw would evaporate into a dream. Or what he saw would go back to being the way it had been these last six years. But he continued to stand there, and his mirrored image did not change. Slowly, almost dazedly, he turned his eyes to the two aliens.

“My arm,” he said.

“Of course,” said the small alien.

Miles turned back to the mirror surface. Hesitantly he lifted his good right arm to feel the left hand and arm. They were solid and warm, alive and movable, under the fingertips of what had been his lone good hand. A bubble of joy and amazement began to swell within him. He turned once more to the aliens.

“You didn’t tell me about this,” he said. “You didn’t tell me my arm would be fixed.”

“It was of a piece with the rest,” said the taller alien. “And we did not want you to commit yourself because of anything like a bribe.”

Miles turned back to the mirror surface, feeling his left arm and marveling at it once more. The sensation in the arm as he moved it woke him to the sensations of the rest of his body. Looking at himself closely in the mirror surface now, he saw that he was heavier, more erect, in every way stronger and more vital than he had been before. In his mind he tried to find words to express how it was with him now, but the words would not come. He felt all in one piece—and he felt invisible. That was the closest he could come to it. There were no sensations of sublevel pains, weariness, or heaviness about him. He and his body were one, as—he could now remember—he had not felt since he had been very young. He turned back to the aliens.

“Thank you,” he said.

“There is no need to thank us,” said the shorter of the two aliens. “What we did to you we did as much for ourselves as for you. Now it’s time for you to start to become charged with the identification sense of your fellow humans.”

Miles stared at him with interest.

“Shall I lie down on the bed again?” Miles asked.

“No,” said the taller alien. “This next is nothing we can do for you. You have to do it all yourself. You’ve been away from the surface of your world for two and a half days now. During that time the people of your world have been informed through all possible news media that soon you’ll be back and moving about among them. They’ve been told, if they see you, not to speak to you or show any awareness of you. They’re simply to let you wander among them and treasure up in their minds the sight of you.”

“That’s all I do?” demanded Miles.

“Not quite all,” said the smaller of the two. “You have to open your inner consciousness to their sense of identification with you and what you’ll be doing in their name. You must endeavor to feel toward them as they feel toward you. You must learn to consider them precious.”

“But where do I go first? What should I do?” Miles asked.

“Simply—wander,” the shorter alien said. “Do you know a poem called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Written by a man named Coleridge.”

“I’ve read it,” said Miles.

“Then perhaps you remember the lines with which the Ancient Mariner explains his moving about the Earth to tell his story,” said the smaller one. There still was no perceptible emotion in his voice, but as he quoted the two lines that followed, it seemed that they rang with particular emphasis in Miles’ mind and memory.

“You will find,” the smaller of the two aliens went on, “that it’ll be with you as it was with the poem’s Ancient Mariner. If you want to move from one place to another, you only need to think of the place you want to be, and you will be there. If you want to lift yourself into the air or fly like a bird, you can do it by thinking of it. You’ll find that no lock will be able to keep you out of any place you want to enter. No wall will bar you. If you wish, you can walk through any barrier. The people of your world who can be reached by the news media have been warned to expect this. They have been told to expect you anywhere—even in their own homes. They have been asked to cooperate by ignoring you when you appear suddenly among them.”

“What if they don’t ignore me?” asked Miles. “Your asking them to do it doesn’t guarantee they will.”

“Those who don’t ignore you,” said the taller alien, “won’t be offering you the necessary identification you are out to gather from as many of your race as possible. So remove yourself from the presence of anyone who does not cooperate, because you will be wasting your time. As far as any inimical actions are concerned, you’ll find that while you can touch anything you like, you can’t be touched or hurt by anything, unless you wish it—right up to and including your race’s nuclear weapons. Nothing can hold you, and nothing can harm you.”

He fell silent. Miles stood uncertainly for a moment.

“Well,” he said at last. “Shall I go now, then, and start?”

“The sooner, the better,” said the taller alien. “Simply think of the spot on the surface of the Earth where you want to be and you’ll be there.”

“And when shall I come back?” asked Miles.

“When you’ve gathered together an identification sense with enough of your fellow humans, you’ll know it,” said the shorter alien. “Simply decide then to come back here to the ship and you’ll be here. Then we’ll leave together for the defense line that’s being set up outside the spiral arm of the galaxy to meet the Silver Horde.”

“All right,” said Miles slowly. He felt strange. It was as if everything that had happened to him had happened within a few moments. At the same time, he was surprised to feel that he was not overwhelmed by it all. Now, particularly since he was in this rebuilt, newly perfect body, all that the aliens said seemed entirely natural, and all that he had to do seemed entirely normal.

He wondered where on Earth it would be best to go to first. While he was still wondering, a stray impulse made him look once more into the mirror image of the wall. He saw himself there, and he could not help smiling at what be saw. He turned back to the aliens.

“I’m a new man, all right,” he said to them.

For the first time since he had met them, Miles saw one of them shake his head. It was the shorter alien.

“No,” said the shorter alien. Neither of them was smiling back. “You’re not a new man. You’re Everyman.”