Zone Yellow

Chapter 6

As soon as my alien guest―oddly, I’d started thinking of him in those terms rather than as my prisoner―was feeling well enough to carry on a coherent conversation, I went in, leaving word with the tough old dame who was the head nurse on the floor that we were not to be disturbed, for anything.

He watched me worriedly with those undersized red eyes. “You, slave,” he said after a while. “I command you to return me to my displacer!”

“Wrong line, Rat-head,” I told him. “I’m the one who’s healthy and armed and at home. You’re the dying stranger. Now, who the hell are you people and what do you want here?”

“I,” he began impressively, “am Master General Graf [baron] Swft. I have the honor to command the Second Wave of the Noble Tide. Alas, I am sick. I, who was a champion of one million, I can barely lift my arm! Were it otherwise, I would not now be passively submitting to impudent interrogation! I must resume my command at once!” He made an abortive movement, as if to throw back the blanket, but instead slumped, gnashing those long, yellow incisors.

“Better take it easy, General,” I said, in what I meant to be a soothing tone. Instead he lunged at me and snarled. “Do not seek to patronize your betters, vermin!”

“The name’s Bayard,” I told him. “Colonel Bayard, of the Net Surveillance Service. You’re my prisoner of war, and I suggest it would be a good idea to behave yourself. By the way, why are you here?”

“It is the high privilege and manifest destiny of the Noble Folk to occupy and make use of all suitable planes of the multi-ordinal All,” he announced. “To this end, I volunteered to conduct a reconnaissance of the Second Devastation―alone, of course, for how could I permit a lesser being to share my high destiny?”

“Alone? There are thousands of you, and more arriving while I sit here and try to figure out what in hell you want.”

“On my initial penetration of the Devastation,” he explained, “I found a cluster of viable planes of existence deep in the forbidden sector. I reported back to Headquarters and proposed the present mission, under the overall command of Captain General His Imperial Highness the Prince of the Select.”

“What is it you want?” I persisted.

“We require this territory as living space for the Noble Folk,” he told me, as if belaboring the obvious. “Candidly,” he went on, “at my first visit, in an area occupied by a great desert on this plane (it is an inland sea at home), I saw no evidence of life of any kind, and we thought we were occupying a virgin plane. We did not suspect the presence of your own combative kind, akin, we have discovered, to the detestable yilps, the ubiquituous primate pests of Ylokk, the scurrying vermin that infest our fruit trees and godowns―as well as garbage dumps,” he added, sneering. “And perhaps to their slightly larger jungle-dwelling relatives, the mongs. You attacked us on sight; naturally, we responded in kind. You call this ‘war’ in one of your dialects; we have no word for it. The Noble Folk of Ylokk are peaceful and dwell in amity.”

“I’ve watched some of your ‘Noble Folk’ eating their dead comrades,” I said with audible disapproval. “Sometimes before they were dead. What’s noble about that?”

“Ah, my poor fellows are starving,” Swft mourned. “At home, we always wait for brain-death before beginning.”

“You eat humans, too,” I pointed out, “or at least snack a little. We don’t like that.”

He wagged his narrow head. “Nor do I,” he sighed. “It makes one dreadfully bilious. And we’re quite sick enough already. The disease, in truth, is what drove us here.”

“Aha! The truth at last.”

“I have spoken truly,” the alien huffed. “In Great Ylokk, the disease rages, killing whole towns; our civilization is crumbling! Cities are become charnel houses, where looters roam, attacking the helpless! You, as a sentient being, must, of course do all you can to alleviate suffering on such a scale!”

“Our altruism doesn’t extend, quite, to allowing you to take over our world and destroy our culture,” I explained. “You’ll have to call it off, General, and find another solution. Try Sector Thirty-five. There’s a fine swath of unoccupied Lines there, where, as far as we can determine, the mammals didn’t make it, and the insects rule the world.”

“Pah!” he spat. “You’d relegate the Noble Folk to a nest of fleas? You will regret this insolence, Colonel!”

“I doubt it, General,” I told him. “But it isn’t my feelings―or yours―that are the problem we’re facing. The problem is how I can convince you this invasion of yours won’t work, before we’ve both suffered irreparable damage?”

“Your word ‘invasion,’ implying as it does the violent seizure of territory rightfully the property of others, is inappropriate,” he snarled. “We found no population of the Noble Folk here, and never dreamed of the existence of another sapient species―especially an overgrown yilp or mong. We came as peaceful colonists to people a deserted world.”

“You must have realized your mistake pretty quickly,” I pointed out. “You couldn’t have imagined the buildings and machines you encountered were natural formations.”

“You mongs―” he stated.

“ ‘Humans,’ ” I corrected.

“Very well, ‘humongs,’ if it matters,” he resumed impatiently, “and we Ylokk as well, are a part of nature, and all our works are natural. As natural, say, as a bird’s nest, or a beehive, a beaver dam, a larva’s labyrinth, a spider’s web, and so on. I concede I had doubts when I saw what was clearly a city, if overly spacious and light-drenched.”

“That’s the first time anybody ever described Stockholm in those terms,” I commented. “Why didn’t you call it off when you saw we were civilized? You can drop the pretense that you didn’t know: your points of entry are all located in major cities.”

He waved that away, weakly. “The proper sites for cities,” he said didactically, “are constant across the planes. We quite naturally sited our staging depots in our cities; thus we arrived in yours.”

“What about the first time?” I chivvied him, “when you say you arrived in a desert?”

“An experimental displacer installation, located on a tiny island in the Sea of Desolation, for reasons of security,” he grumped.

“You should have backed off as soon as you saw the first town,” I insisted.

“Impossible!” the sick alien croaked. “The plan was too far advanced in execution―and the need to escape disease remained!”

“Why didn’t you develop a vaccine against this disease?” I wanted to know.

He looked bewildered. “I recall the word, of course,” he said. “My deep briefing was complete, if hurried. But the concept eludes me: to interfere, by one’s own actions, with a Provision of Nature? Our philosophers have perceived that the Killing is in fact, a benign dispensation of Nature to alleviate the problem of overpopulation. You would propose to interfere with the working of the Will?”

“In a small way,” I conceded. “This disease of yours is caused by a virus, a competing life-form, which invades your tissues, destroys red blood cells, gives you headaches, weakens you, and finally kills you. It doesn’t have to. It can be cured.”

“You rave, Colonel,” he countered. “Surely you don’t believe it’s possible to influence the workings of the Will?”

“We do it all the time,” I told him. “It’s part of the Will; that’s what this building is for. Why do you think we brought you here?”

“To kill me, of course,” he supplied promptly. “Debased creatures though you are, you could not fail to recognize in me a superior being, and are according me a high ritual death suitable to my rank. I acknowledge your propriety in this matter, at least. I await the moment of awful truth unflinchingly. Bring on your shamans! Do your worst! I shall die as a peer of the Noble Folk should!”

“We’re trying to cure you, not kill you, General,” I told him, feeling weary. I had a right to feel weary. I hadn’t slept since . . . I couldn’t remember.

“I call on you now to place a sword in my hand,” he declared as if he fully expected instant obedience. “My own hallowed blade is in my displaces Fetch it at once!”

“If you’re so peaceful,” I said, “what’s all this ‘hallowed blade’ stuff? A pig-sticker is a pig-sticker, isn’t it?”

“Your astounding ignorance is beneath my contempt,” he told me. “The origins of the Code of Honor lie so far back in the history of the Noble Folk that―but I perceive you mock me,” he changed the tack. “You yourself are no stranger to the Code of the Warrior―or your distorted version of it.”

I let that one pass. “So you have no medical science whatever?” I mused aloud. “With your obvious high technology in other areas, one would expect―”

“Pah!” he squeaked. “As well to demand a science of weather control. Doubtless you’ve noted that across all the phases, or A-lines as you say, the weather is unchanging.”

I agreed I’d noticed that.

“Even here, so far outside the formal limits of the Governance,” he added. “The sole exceptions are the areas of the Devastations, where the very landforms have been disrupted, modifying the air and water currents.”

“And you crossed the Blight, or Devastation if you prefer, to seek out our phase, above all others,” I stated. “Why? Why not some closer line, one more like your own home-worlds? And what do you mean, ‘Devastations’? There’s only one Blight.”

“At the fringes of our jurisdiction,” Swft told me, readily enough, “we found repeated evidence of the presence of a rival power―your own, I now perceive. By mathematical methods, we deduced the focal point of this interference―the Other Devastation. We already knew, of course, of the strange Devastation surrounding our own home-phase. When I explored here in this second Devastation, I had no reason to expect to encounter rational beings. We assumed your nexus had perished in the terrible upheaval that created your ‘Blight.’ ”

“Your ‘Devastation,’ ” I told him, “is no doubt the result of failed displacer experiments in the closely allied lines. You should have realized that a second such area of destruction indicated another Net-traveling line. But you just started in to claim some vacant real estate,” I finished sarcastically.

“Once our enterprise was launched,” he told me as if stating the obvious, “using, as it had, the last of our resources, there was no turning back. Can you imagine me, the originator of the scheme, returning to Ylokk mere days after our gala embarkation, to report to the Noblest of All that it had turned out to be inconvenient to pursue the plan further?”

“Awkward,” I agreed. “But you’ll have to do it anyway. You’ve seen enough to realize you can’t make it stick.”

“Perhaps,” he remarked. “Perhaps not as originally conceived, but there are other approaches, more subtle ones, that might yet prevail. Not all your local phases are as well-organized and informed as this, your Zero-zero coordinate.”

“You’re talking yourself into a short life stretch in solitary,” I warned him. “All this is being recorded, of course, and there are those in the Imperial government who would be extremely cautious about releasing an agent of the enemy to continue activities prejudicial to the peace and order of the Imperium. We, too, have noticed traces of Net operations―yours, I presume―beyond the edge of our Zone of Primary Interest. We had planned some day to trace you to your source, and…”I broke off, thinking suddenly of a bleak region we called Zone Yellow.

“And invade us,” the alien supplied. “The idea of a preemptive strike had been mentioned,” I had to concede. “But we hoped to establish a cooperative relationship, as we have with still other Net powers.”

“I fear the carnage here obviates that possibility,” he declared. “Both from our viewpoint and your own. Unfortunate, perhaps. But, to be candid, I doubt our people would ever have been able to overcome their instinctive distaste for the mong tribe.”

“You and I seem to be doing all right,” I pointed out. “I hardly ever think of you in terms of bristly sewer rats anymore.”

“I’ve had the opportunity to read in your literature, during a null-time TDY,” the alien general told me. “I was revolted by the cruel treatment you have accorded the distant relatives of the Noble Folk. But I confess our own persecution of the vile yilps has been no less genocidal.”

“Maybe we’ve both made mistakes,” I suggested. “But right now, the problem is that your people are still pouring in here at the rate of over a million a day.”

“Three million,” he corrected crisply. “Our overcrowding is acute,” he added in explanation.

“Not via the staging depot on Strandvagen,” I challenged. “We’ve monitored it long enough to know.”

“There are eleven major mass-transfer portals,” he told me, “including a few in truly deserted areas. The one you know and are doubtless prepared to destroy with your curious active-at-a-distance projectile weapons, was the first. We realized we’d erred in imagining the phase to be uninhabited, and placed others in areas remote from your population centers.”

“Not quite,” I corrected. “Your troops have been reported from all major capitals. You’re not warlike, but you started a war,” I summed up wearily. “You wouldn’t think of invading the territory of a sentient species, but here you are. Your story lacks credibility, General.”

He wagged his narrow head, a gesture of assent he’d apparently picked up from us humans, and said, “I can readily understand your confusion, Colonel. But it is not enough merely to identify apparent inconsistencies in my account of affairs. You must,” he was very serious now, “must understand this much: the needs of the Noble Race are paramount. Your feckless resistance to our peaceful occupation of needed living space must cease at once! It is an inconvenience not to be borne!”

“You were doing the ‘reasonable’ number, remember, General?” I countered. “What about our living space? And after all, we humongs are the rightful owners of the territory in question.”

“By what right?” he came back, as if he’d been hoping I’d say that.

“By right of birth, prior occupation and development, and human need,” I told him, as if I’d been waiting for the question.

“ ‘Prior occupation…’ ” he mused. “I think your local ‘rats,’ as you call these humble folk, have at least as ancient a claim.”

“Not to our granaries!” I told him; I was beginning to get a little impatient with his bland absurdities.

“How not?” he riposted. “The produce of the soil knows no ‘natural’ exploiter. The plants grow for whoever can reap them.”

“We plant them,” I told him, “and reap them, too. We built our cities and stocked them, and that’s too obvious to talk about!”

He gave me an oblique look. “You ‘planted’ them, you say. I fear we’re entering an area touched on only lightly in my autobriefing―another curious concept, implying manipulation of the Will.”

“You’re telling me you don’t practice agriculture?” I queried incredulously.

He hesitated before replying. “I know the term, of course, but fail to comprehend it. ‘To cause plants to grow in concentration in a specified area.’ It is beyond belief. Plants grow where they will.”

I talked to him for another half hour, without any notable progress. He still held to the view that humanity ought to get out of the way of the Noble Folk, thereby ending hostilities.

“You claim you know nothing of us,” I reminded him, “and yet you arrived here fully briefed and with command of both Swedish and English. How do you explain that?”

“I am,” he replied stiffly, “under no compulsion to explain anything. However,” he continued, “I see no harm to my cause in clarifying what I perceive must seem mysterious to you. Very well:

“We have developed a technique of rapid transfer of information to deep memory, a development, actually, of the ancestral ability to remember the location of buried nuts. My discovery-contact with your plane gave, as I’ve explained, no indication of habitation, since I arrived, as we now know, in a great desert―the ‘Sahara,’ I’ve learned you call it. At home the site is that of a shallow sea. The subsequent routine follow-up crews, however, found primitive temporary camps of your kind, those of nomadic tribes, it developed; so naturally the follow-up teams went on to scout more widely. It was they who assembled the briefing materials, with the exception of the linguistic data on the two related dialects extant here at my designated point of entry, which coincides, of course, with the position of the Noble City. Those last data were, of course, hastily gathered at the last moment before our scheduled jump-off; hence the imperfections in my command of the tongues.”

“You’re doing fine,” I encouraged him.

He gave me a haughtily defensive look, if I could read the limited range of expression on his snouted face. “We erred,” he intoned, “in not more thoroughly examining our target plane. But you must recall: we were―and are―in a desperate situation, and time was of the essence. A less sensitive people, such as yourselves, would have simply thrown in an overwhelming force, without consideration of possible consequences for the indignies.”

“Gosh,” I said. “Maybe we all ought to just whisk ourselves off into the Blight.”

“Nothing so drastic,” he corrected. “A mass evacuation to one of the Blight Insulars would be quite adequate. We will permit and even expedite such an accommodation. I can go so far as to say that we will place at your disposal our method of mass-transfer.”

“I was kidding,” I explained. Then I had to explain what “kidding” was. “We have no intention of abandoning our homeland,” I summed up.

“In that case,” he said in a tone of forced patience, “I can see no prospect of any peaceful accommodation between our two species. Pity. Together we might have accomplished much.”

“We still have a lot of talking to do, General,” I told him. “I’d better go now. You get some rest; I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Speaking with you, Colonel,” he answered, “I had for a moment almost forgotten the desperate plight of the Folk. Fare well.”

On that note, I left him and his lingering odor of rotten oranges. For a moment there it had seemed possible that we could somehow reconcile our disparate interests, something that would be of great benefit to both species: the Ylokk had some techniques the NSS would find very useful, and again there was a lot we could teach them, too; but now I was feeling very low. I wanted to talk to Barbro: just the sound of her voice would cheer me up, but what I had to tell her―that I had to make a dash for Headquarters to report what I’d learned about the invaders (and I’d learned more than Swft knew he’d told me)―wouldn’t cheer her up.

I found her, as usual, in the thick of the hottest crisis we had going: a breakthrough had penetrated our improvised defenses on the river side of town. She was at Field HQ, monitoring the situation map with its cheery (if you didn’t know what they meant) colored lights indicating the position of the enemy, unit-by-unit; as they advanced raggedly out of the forest, and of our inadequate forces as they held and held―and fell back. In a few minutes, it appeared, the hospital would be surrounded and isolated.

“Fortunately, Brion,” she reported to me, “we are perhaps saved by the fact that they are making even more and worse mistakes than we.”

I was giving her a fast briefing when Dr. Smovia came hurrying up to me, trailed by a sheepish female MP. I waved her off, and asked Barbro to carry on. Then I kissed her good-bye for now. Smovia was hovering, looking worried.

“Look here, Colonel,” he carped, “my patient is hardly ready to leave the hospital. In addition, he’s a carrier―”

“No danger to humans, though?” I said hopefully.

“Of course not,” he brushed that aside. “But it is rather high-handed of you to release him without so much as notifying me―”

“Hold it,” I cut in. “I haven’t released him! I left him in bed ten minutes ago! Do you mean―?”

“He’s gone,” Smovia grumped. “Not in the hospital. I’ve checked. I assumed that you―”

I cut him off. “He’s on his own, I’m afraid.” I went to the window and looked down the street. As I’d feared, the alien traveler wasn’t where I’d left it, unguarded. Barbro patted my arm encouragingly. She knew I was mentally kicking myself.

“Get on the hot line, Barb,” I told her. “Tip off our perimeter stations to be on the lookout―but don’t try to stop him. They can’t; it would just give us needless casualties.”

“What does this mean?” Smovia demanded. “Where would he go, still weak as he is?”

“Home,” I told him curtly. “He’s gone now; it can’t be helped.” I turned to Barbro. “This makes my dash for the city more necessary than ever,” I told her. She understood that, and nodded. I took off. I couldn’t find my sergeant; I left word for him and went out into the street, where I flagged down Lieutenant Helm and told him I was going to break out. He naturally wanted more details, and I told him to round up the best of our three half-tracks and meet me on Kungsgatan in half an hour. He left at a run.

I went back inside and found Smovia and asked him to come along, and to bring his alien virus cultures. He didn’t understand why, but didn’t give me an argument. I got our HQ crew busy digging defensive works, and briefed them.

“I’ll be back in forty-eight hours,” I told them. “Hold your position until then.” They said they could, and would. I hoped so. Lieutenant Helm returned with the tracks gassed, provisioned, and ready. We didn’t bother with subtleties; we went out the gate past where I’d carelessly left Swft’s displacer unguarded, and saw the same disorganized skirmishers with their short-range weapons. I could almost believe Swft’s contention that the Ylokk weren’t warlike. They made no attempt to interfere; then we came to the roadblock. It was a forbidding-looking barrier at first glance: felled trees, interlaced, with the interstices stacked full of rubble. I took to the shoulder and went across some bumpy ground and back onto the undamaged road. A few Ylokk ran in toward us, but halted at a distance. For invaders, they didn’t seem to have much idea what they were doing.

“Don’t underrate them,” I advised Helm. “They have some technology and ought to be capable of waging effective warfare even without military science. But as individuals they seem to have no imagination or initiative. If we do anything unexpected, they’re at a loss.”

“Suppose it occurs to one of them to get in our path and fire a disruptor at close range?” he mused aloud.

“In that case, we shoot him, proving it was a bad idea,” I replied. But I was worried. We kept on, and they let us through. After a few miles we didn’t see any more of the skulking rat-men. It was an hour’s run to the suburbs. We came to the first bridge into Stockholm and it was intact. Five minutes later we were moving along Drottninsgatan unimpeded. There were heaps of dead aliens in the streets, along with a few human bodies, attended only by scavenging Ylokk. The air filters kept the worst of the stink out of the truck’s cab.

In spite of their massive casualties, there were still plenty of the rat-men abroad, marching in ragged columns, mostly along narrow back streets, sometimes herding human captives. There was no visible damage to the city. The lone shot I’d seen fired in Strandvagen was unique. We came to the high wrought-iron fence in front of Headquarters and were met and escorted inside by two snappy officers in Swedish field-gray.