Hour of the Horde

7

The tiger-faced head of Chak’ha rolled upon the bunk—rolled away from the gaze of Miles. Clearly Chak’ha did not want to talk about it.

Miles had come back to the room of the ship in which he had awakened. Chak’ha was still there, lying on his bunk. But when Miles had started to question him about the pecking order, the combats, and the relationship of all this to the coming of the Silver Horde, he had felt unhappiness rising from the lax body of the alien like a cloud of sickness.

“There’s just nothing to do,” Chak’ha said, looking away from him now, looking at the blank inner wall of his bunk. “There’s just nothing else to do.”

“Nothing to do but fight with each other?” Miles demanded. “No training to be done? No practicing with our weapons? No practicing with the ship itself? What kind of fighting ship is this?”

“It isn’t a fighting ship,” said Chak’ha to the wall. “It’s the Fighting Rowboat.”

“The Fighting Rowboat?”

“That’s what we all call her,” muttered Chak’ha.

Miles stared at him. In their common shipboard language, the name Chak’ha had just given the ship was a bitter sneer at the vessel and all those aboard her. The name connoted not only worthlessness, but puffed-up, bragging worthlessness—as if someone whose duty it was to fight should be nicknamed the Ferocious Mouse. Chak’ha remained with his face turned away, offering no further explanation.

“Look at me!” ordered Miles. Slowly, reluctantly, the tiger mask turned back to confront him.

“What do you mean, this isn’t a fighting ship?” demanded Miles.

“I mean what I say,” said Chak’ha stubbornly. “This ship will never fight anything—let alone the Silver Horde.”

“How do you know?”

“Everybody knows,” said Chak’ha with a sullen air of hopelessness. “Everybody on the ship knows. We began to know it when we found out they didn’t care what happened to us or what we did here.”

“Who didn’t care? The Center Aliens?” said Miles.

“Them. All the others in this Battle Line,” said Chak’ha. “It’s plain they don’t care. It became plain to the first few of us who arrived here. Wait. You’ll see. You’ll find out that it makes no difference to them what happens to us—except that we aren’t allowed to kill each other when we fight. You saw how you and I were stopped.”

“Well, if we aren’t here to fight the Silver Horde, what are we here for?” said Miles harshly.

“Who knows?” replied Chak’ha gloomily. “I suppose the Center Aliens know, but they’re not likely to tell us.”

“Nobody—no one aboard this ship knows?” demanded Miles.

Chak’ha, without moving upon his bunk, gave the impression of shrugging to Miles’ emotion-sensitive perceptions.

“Maybe some of the higher-up ones here know,” he said. “Maybe Eff”—the name was a sound like the letter f prolonged and ending in a sharp whistle—“who’s second. Or Luhon, who can beat anybody aboard. Maybe somebody like that knows. I don’t.”

“Which one’s Luhon?” demanded Miles. “I’ll ask him.”

Chak’ha’s head rolled on the bunk, negatively.

“He won’t tell you.”

“Never mind that,” said Miles. “Tell me which one he is.”

“He’s thin and quick and gray-skinned,” said Chak’ha in a lifeless voice, “and his external ears are pointed.”

Without a further word, Miles turned and went out of the room. He reentered the lounge and studied its occupants, but none of them fitted the description Chak’ha had given him. He turned and went back through the ship, searching through the other crew quarters—at least those rooms of which the doors were not closed. Still he met nobody fitting the description he had been given. Finally, he turned and went forward. There, alone in the bow control room, he saw a slight, gray-skinned, furless individual with ears that would have fitted well on a pixie or elf out of Earth’s legends. Whoever he was, if he was Luhon, he looked like a light-bodied, harmless being to have outfought everybody else aboard the ship. Miles studied him for a second, watching him from the doorway of the control room. The other was playing with the keys on a control console. He ignored Miles, as all aboard had ignored him, and Miles was able to notice how smoothly and swiftly the fingers of the other moved. For all his apparent slightness of limb, he must have muscle if he topped the pecking order, Miles concluded, and if suppleness and his ordinary speed of movement were any index, it might be that his speed was really remarkable. It was hard to believe that this slim creature sitting before him could be at the head of the social system aboard the ship. Still, Miles reminded himself, for all his ferocious appearance, Chak’ha had turned out to be least of them all. Appearances plainly were no index to the dangerousness of his fellow crew members.

Miles went forward into the room until he stood just behind the other individual, who appeared to be checking out the console of the control board before him. Glancing at that control board now, Miles was surprised, for a fleeting second, to discover that he understood its controls as well as he understood the common language they spoke aboard the ship. Then he swung his attention back to his reason for coming here.

“Are you Luhon?’ he demanded.

The other neither turned nor moved. Instead, he went on with his movements, ignoring Miles as if Miles were nowhere in existence, let alone less than three feet behind him.

“I said,” repeated Miles, slowly and distinctly, “are you Luhon? If you are, I want to talk to you.”

The other continued to work with his controls, apparently deaf and blind to the presence of Miles in the same room with him.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” said Miles evenly, keeping the white flare of his newly discovered battle lust and fury carefully under control. “I only want some information from you—information I think I have a right to have. I only want to know whether it’s true that this ship will never go into battle against the Silver Horde and, if that’s true, why the Center Aliens brought us all here together after all. If you don’t know the answer to either of those things, you don’t have to speak. All you have to do is shake your head.”

Luhon’s head did not move. He went on with what he was doing.

Miles waited as the seconds fled away into minutes.

“Will you answer me?” he said at last, clenching his teeth on the anger building inside of him.

Luhon made no response.

Suddenly the inner fury broke loose in Miles. It boiled up whitely inside him. His arm muscles tensed and jerked with the impulse to reach out, grab the other by the shoulders, spin him around, and choke an answer out of him.

Luhon still continued what he was doing, unperturbed. But just in time, Miles noticed the pointed right ear twitch and flick backward in Miles’ direction.

Caution clamped suddenly again on Miles. Apparently he was not as ignored as he had thought. Evidently Luhon was not only aware of him, but confident enough of his own physical superiority to stay with his back turned to Miles—practically inviting Miles to attack first. Such confidence, coupled with the fact that Luhon was acknowledged by Chak’ha to be first in the pecking order among the twenty-three members of the crew, rang a sudden warning in Miles.

The time might come, thought Miles, when he might want to have it out with Luhon. But not yet—not, at least, until he had seen more of the other, particularly in action, and discovered the source of Luhon’s power and victory over his fellow crew members.

Miles turned and went out of the control room. He went back through the ship, out through the open hatch and down the steps onto the open platform on which the ship lay. He needed to think, and in order to think clearly, he needed to get completely away from the apparent puzzle of the ship, with its twenty-three representatives of twenty-three races apparently brought here for no purpose but to quarrel and to fight with one another.

He explored the platform. It was a flat structure—like a raft in the blackness of the surrounding space, harshly and metallically revealed by the unmoving, unchanging glare of the artificial sun that the Center Aliens had apparently set up to illuminate the Battle Line. From where Miles stood on the platform that artificial sun was larger than, but not as yellow as, the sun of Earth. It had a white, fluorescent glare, which his eyes could not endure to look at directly for more than a fraction of a second. The shadows this light cast on the surface of the raft were as hard and sharp and black as those cast by rocks on an airless moon. Miles walked around the platform and discovered a sort of shed, which he entered. Inside were twenty-three strange machines and stores of what appeared to be—judging by the fact that one of them was a pile of earthly foodstuffs—special rations for each of the various crew members aboard the ship. Miles went on through the shed and out a door at the far end. Behind the shed he saw, lying in a metal cradle, a smaller craft which looked like a miniature version of their ship. It was apparently some sort of courier boat, with two seats inside it.

Inspiration woke in him. He went hastily up to the ship, slid open the door in its side, and climbed in, closing the door behind him. Seating himself in one of the seats, he examined the control board of the small vessel.

As he had suspected, the controls here were immediately as understandable to him as the controls at which Luhon had been working in the larger ship had been. The white anger, still surging below the conscious level in him, erupted suddenly in a flare of new determination.

He would get an answer—one way or another.

He touched the controls of the ship before him with hands as sure as if they had practiced for years. The little ship floated upward from its cradle, turned slowly in the blue-white glare of the artificial sun, and headed up the Battle Line.

For a few seconds it seemed rather to hang in space than to move. But then, without any physical feeling of acceleration, it apparently began to move faster and faster. The nearer ships of the line swelled up on the vision screen before him and fled past it, one by one. There was no sensation of any change in the rate of speed with which it moved, but Miles began to perceive that this small ship went quickly while between the anchored vessels, then slowed down for a few miles on either side of each ship’s location while passing, then took up again its between-ship velocity. A feeling of exhilaration began to warm and glow within Miles. At his fingertips, the little ship moved as if it were an extension of his own physical being. He felt as if its speed were his speed; its power, his power; its sureness of response, his own.

Now he was already past the area of smaller, intermediate, and odd-shaped alien ships and approaching the first of the large globe-shaped ships of the Center Aliens. He could see the first of them now, far ahead of him at full magnification on the battle screen built into the console on which his fingers rested—

Without warning, there was someone alongside him in the other seat of the two-man ship. Miles turned his head and looked.

It was one of the Center Aliens. He was so like the two who had brought Miles from Earth, in the stillness of his pseudohuman features, that for a moment Miles thought one of his old acquaintances had rejoined him. But then he felt the stranger-quality in this particular Center Alien—as he had felt emotional differences in Chak’ha and Luhon and others of his own crew. This Center Allen said nothing; but his hands rested on the other console, which was a duplicate of the control console before Miles, and the little ship turned and headed back the way it had come.

For a second Miles stared. Then his own fingers leaped to the controls before him. But there was no response from the ship. It was as if his console had gone dead and only the one in front of the Center Alien controlled the ship.

“What’re you doing?” snapped Miles, turning to the other. “I want to talk to somebody—somebody in authority!”

“Talk to me,” answered the Center Alien. There was no inflection to his words, but Miles felt an indifference in the alien as remote and icy as contempt. The other continued to drive the two-man vessel back the way it had come, without looking at Miles.

“I was told our ship isn’t ever going to fight the Silver Horde!” said Miles. “Is that true?”

“Quite true,” answered the Center Alien.

“Then why bring me out here in the first place?” demanded Miles. “Why bring any of us on the Fighting Rowboat?”

“It’s true that individually, and even collectively, you add little directly to our general Battle Line strength,” answered the Center Alien. “All of you together amount to less than one of the least of my own people in that respect. But there is more than the direct addition of strength to be considered. Besides his own personal powers, which vary widely from individual to individual, each one in the Battle Line has a function in which all are equal. That is to act as a resonator, or amplifier, of the group strength and as a channel through which that strength may be directed at the enemy. There is what you might call a feedback effect—from the group to the individual and back again—where the psychic force is concerned.”

“Feedback?” Miles stared at him. “Psychic force?”

“The weapons aboard your ship, and aboard all our ships,” said the Center Alien, as their small two-man ship continued to slide past the odd-shaped vessels of the Center Aliens’ outer allies, “have a dual function. They bring to bear against enemy ships not only a physical, but what I call a psychic force. ‘Psychic’ is not the correct word, but it is the closest I can come to a word in your understanding. The physical element of these weapons is effective enough—it can rip open any Horde ship that comes within effective range. But it is the weapons’ ability to project our general psychic strength against the invaders on which our whole strategy of defense is based.”

Miles frowned.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because the strategy of the Horde’s attack is based, by contrast, on the overwhelming numbers of its ships and people,” said the alien. “The Horde counts on being able to pay any price required by a battle, just as long as for every dozen or hundred or thousand of its own ships which are lost, it accomplishes the destruction of at least one opposing ship.”

“A thousand for one?” Miles looked narrowly at the other.

“At least that high,” replied the Center Alien emotionlessly. “The basic belief of the Horde is that it can afford the losses in ships that any enemy force can inflict on it and still have enough of its own ships left to conquer. But there is, we hope, a point at which even the Horde will refuse to pay the price of conquest. And it is this point we hope to reach with the aid of a psychic force.”

Miles frowned again. The words of the Center Alien sounded as if they should make sense to him, but at the same time their real meaning seemed to skitter away from his understanding like a dried leaf before a November wind.

“The psychic force can kill then?” he asked.

“No.” The Center Alien spoke the short negative word briefly. “The psychic force is no more than that same strength of identification you absorbed from those individuals of your home world who felt for you before you left. Ask yourself if that feeling inside you can kill. Identification implies empathy, and an empathic response cannot be used to destroy, being creative in nature. Creation and destruction are antithetical within the same process, just as synthesis and analysis cannot proceed by the same process at the same time—or, in terms possibly more familiar to you, you cannot drive one of your home world’s automobiles in forward and reverse gear off the same motor at the same time. Even if it were possible to do this from an engineering standpoint, the two attempts at motion in opposite directions would cancel each other out into motionlessness—a nonexistence of motion. So with any attempt to kill using the psychic force.”

“Then I don’t follow you,” said Miles grimly.

“I am explaining,” said the Center Alien, “why our weapons have a physical as well as psychical element. The psychic force cannot kill—but it can control, to the extent of dominating the individual by the group will or the will of the lesser group by the greater. So we will use it against the Horde. With sufficient outflow of psychic power, we hope to hold paralyzed all the invaders who come within range of our weapons while our weapons destroy them.”

He paused. Miles nodded slowly.

“I see,” said Miles thoughtfully.

“Yes,” said the Center Alien, “you see. By this means we hope, not to conquer the Horde—for that is impossible—but to convince them that we can slaughter them almost at will, while remaining very nearly invulnerable to their weapons, and so make them pay such a heavy price in lost ships for each ship of ours they manage to destroy that they will turn away toward some other galaxy that may be less strongly defended against them.”

“If the psychic force is that effective,” said Miles harshly, “why can’t we on the Fighting Rowboat be with you when you hit the Horde with your own ships?”

“Because the psychic force is not, in fact, that effective,” said the alien. “Each use of it requires an expenditure of energy by each of the individuals making use of it. As long as they do not become weary, these individuals may not only use their own innate psychic force, but also may draw on our general pool of strength and channel it through themselves to make them many times as effective as they would be alone. But the energy of no one, not even us of the Center, is inexhaustible, and you twenty-three would become exhausted very much more quickly than we. Exhausted, an individual loses contact with the general pool of strength. In such a case you would face the Horde with only your own feeble psychic powers and physical weapons, and your ship’s destruction by the Horde would follow almost immediately.”

“What of it?” demanded Miles. “It’s our necks we’re risking—”

“They are not yours alone,” interrupted the alien. “You refuse to understand. As contributors of original psychic force your twenty-three are nothing—less than the weakest of one of my own race, all of you combined. So that if we lost you, we would lose less than one effective individual unit like myself in terms of original force. But as resonators and amplifiers, you are individually equal to all other individuals in the Battle Line. So that in losing you in that respect, we would be losing the equivalent of twenty-three units.”

He paused.

“Do you see now,” he said, “why we prefer to keep you back out of the battle and safe, where we can draw on you for resonated strength, without risking your almost certain loss if you joined us in the fighting?”

Again he paused. But Miles said nothing.

“You are unhappy about this,” said the Center Alien. “That is because you are still a victim of those primitive emotions which we of the Center long ago amputated from our own egos so that we would continue the intellectual development that has made us what we have become. Because you have such emotions, you assume that we have them also and that our decisions about you are colored by emotion. But they are not. Here in this Battle Line, you are just as a group of chimpanzees would be back on your native world armed with high-powered rifles. The fact that the chimpanzee can be rote-trained to hold the rifle and pull its trigger does not mean it can be trusted with the weapon in the sense that a human soldier could be trusted to carry, maintain, and use his gun effectively against an enemy. That is why, when we actually join battle with the Horde—and whether we do or not will depend on whether our Center computational matrix calculates that we have a chance for victory if we do join battle—the actual fighting contact will be made by us of the Center and some few of the older, more advanced races on whom we can rely. It is simple logic that dictates this, as it dictates that you be held out of the fight and safe.”

Miles stared ahead into the vision screen of the small craft. In that screen now, he saw the distant, fast-swelling shape of the platform on which the Fighting Rowboat rested.

“The numbers of the Horde,” said the Center Alien, “are literally beyond your imagination. Equally beyond you are the questions and factors involved in the function of this Battle Line, which would not exist here and now if it were not for us of the Center. Face the fact that these things are too great for your mind to grapple with, and resign yourself to your situation.”

They were almost on the platform now. The Center Alien said no more but brought the little ship in for a landing in its cradle. As it touched down, he disappeared from the seat beside Miles. Wrapped in his own bitter thoughts, Miles slowly opened the door on his side of the craft and climbed out. He went back into the main ship.

But this time he avoided both the control room and the lounge. Instead, he went down the connecting corridors until he came to the first of the weapons, standing isolated and alone with its empty transparent bubble that faced outward into the blackness of intergalactic space. For a long moment he stood looking at it, and now his mind alerted by what the Center Alien had said, saw with the same sort of knowledge that had told him about the control consoles of both ships that these weapons had been neglected and ignored.

It was not that they were rusted or decayed. There was no sign of dust or cobwebs on them. But with that feeling part of his mind which had become so sensitive lately, Miles felt the coldness of long disuse that hung like a fog about the weapon before him. Feeling it now, he began to understand at least part of what the Center Alien had been trying to tell him. Psychic force must pulse through this device before him if it were to help destroy the Horde. But he also now recognized something that the Center Alien had not bothered to tell him. If this weapon were to be operated in battle, a certain amount of the psychic force of whatever individual operated it would necessarily have to be used up first merely to warm it up in a psychic sense, before it would fire. That was the penalty of the long disuse with which the twenty-three aboard this ship had treated it. It confirmed the indifference, amounting to contempt, of the Center Alien as he had explained his superiority over Miles on the way back here.

It did more. It explained the self-contempt in which the twenty-three held themselves. Their undeniable, unavoidable knowledge of their own inferiority and uselessness compared to the power and wisdom of the Center Aliens—in fact, to everyone else in this Battle Line. It would be that knowledge and self-contempt which had driven them to set up the pecking order, so that all but the weakest of them would have at least one other individual to whom they could feel superior.

Miles became aware that his jaw muscles were aching. He had clenched them some time since. He forced himself to relax them. Inside him, his understanding of the situation here was complete at last, carved on his mind like letters in stone.

What use was it to them—to himself and the human race—to be physically saved from extermination if the price of that saving was to face the fact that their greatest accomplishments and dreams were less than line drawings on a cave wall and that in the eyes of the race which dominated the galaxy, men were no more than ape-men scratching themselves mindlessly as they lolled in the sun?

The Center Alien had advised him to resign himself to the situation. Miles laughed harshly. Wise and powerful the Center Aliens might be, but here was proof that their wisdom and knowledge was not all-perfect.

If nothing else, they had underestimated humans—and Miles himself. Powered by that same capacity for emotion that this advanced people had despised and discarded, Miles knew that he was no more capable of resignation than an eagle is of forgetting he has wings. There was no point in his trying resignation.

Therefore, he would not. The old, familiar, grim determination that had kept him at his painting formed within him again now, but with a new purpose. Deeply, he realized now that he was not afraid of the Silver Horde or daunted by the Center Aliens. He was not about to obey the latter blindly, as if they were but one more superior member of a larger pecking order.

He would make up his own mind about what he would do. And that meant that in spite of both Horde and Center Aliens, the Fighting Rowboat would take its place in the battle—when the time came. Yes, the Fighting Rowboat would fight—if he had to take her out alone against the Silver Horde, she would fight.