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Drabix smiled, then snickered. “ Amicus , go sit down somewhere, will you. The heat’s getting to you.”
“They say even the Kyben were tolerated, Commander. I’m warning you; let the forts alone.”
“Fade off, Friend Ferraro. Command means decision, and my orders were to secure this planet. Secure doesn’t mean fifty impregnable fortresses left untouched, and command doesn’t mean letting bleeding hearts like you scare us into inaction with bogey men.”
The adjutant stood waiting. “Mr. Lalwani,” Drabix said, “tell the ground batteries to commence on signal. Concentrate fire on the southern face of that cube.”
“Yes, sir.” He went away quickly.
“It’s war, Commander. That’s your only answer, that it’s war?”
Drabix would not look at her now. “That’s right. It’s a war to the finish. They declared it, and it’s been that way for forty years. I’m doing my job … and if that makes doing yours difficult, perhaps it’ll show those pimply-assed bureaucrats at Central we need more ships and less Friends of the Enemy. Something has to break this stalemate with the Kyben, and even if I don’t see the end of it I’ll be satisfied knowing I was the one who broke it.”
He gave the signal.
From concealed positions, lancet batteries opened up on the silent black cube on the plain.
Crackling beams of leashed energy erupted from the projectors, criss-crossed as they sped toward their target and impacted on the near face of the cube. Where they struck, novae of light appeared. Drabix lowered the visor on his battle helmet. “Protect your eyes, Friend,” he warned.
Ly
And in that instant she realized no one had asked the right question: where were the original natives of this world?
But it was too late to ask that question.
The barrage went on for a very long time.
Drabix was studying the southern face of the cube through a cyclop. The reports he had received were even more disturbing than the mere presence of the forts: the lancets had caused no visible damage.
Whatever formed those cubes, it was beyond the destructive capabilities of the ground batteries. The barrage had drained their power sources, and still the fort stood unscathed.
“Let them alone? Don’t disturb them? Now do you see the danger, the necessity?” Drabix was spiraling upward, his frustration and anxiety making his voice brittle and high. “Tell me how we secure a war zone with the Enemy in our midst, Friend?”
“They aren’t the Enemy!” she insisted.
“Leave them alone, eh?”
“They want to be left alone.”
Drabix sneered at her, took one last look through the cyclop, and pulled the communicator loose from his wristcuff. He spoke directly to the Descartes , hanging in space above them. “Mr. Kokonen!”
The voice came back, clear and sharp. “Yes, sir?”
“On signal, pour everything you’ve got into the primary lancets. Hit it dead center. And keep it going till you open it up.”
“On signal, sir.”
“Drabix! Wait for Central to —”
“Minus three!”
“Let it alone! Let me try another —”
“Minus two!”
“Drabix … stop …”
“Minus one! Go to Hell, Friend!”
“You’re out of your —”
“Commence firing!”
The lancet hurtled down out of the sky like a river of light. It struck the cube with a force that dwarfed the sum total of a
Ly
And suddenly, the lancet beam was cut off. Not from its source, but at its target. As though a giant, invisible hand had smothered the beam, it hurtled down out of the sky from the invisible dreadnought far above and ended in the sky above the cube. Then, as Drabix watched with eyes widening, and the Amicus watched with open terror choking her, the beam was snuffed out all along its length. It disappeared back up its route of destructive force, into the sky, into the clouds, into the upper atmosphere and was gone.
A moment later, a new sun lit the sky as the dreadnought Descartes was strangled with its own weapon. It flared suddenly, blossomed … and was gone.
Then the cube began to rise from the earth. However much larger it was than what was revealed on the plain, Ly
After endless centuries of solitude, whatever lived in those structures was awakening at last.
They had been content to let the races of the galaxy come and go and conquer and be assimilated, as long as they were not severely threatened. They might have allowed humankind to come here and exist, or they might have allowed the Kyben the same freedom. But not both.
Drabix was whimpering beside her.
And not even her pity for him could save them.
He looked at her, white-eyed. “You got your wish,” she said. “The war is over.”
The original natives of the planet were taking a hand, at last. The stalemate was broken. A third force had entered the war. And whether they would be inimical to Terrans or Kyben, no one could know. Amicus Ferraro grew cold as the cube rose up out of the plain, towering above everything.
It was clear: roused from sleep, the inhabitants of the fifty forts would never consider themselves Friends of the Enemy.
Bright Eyes
“How did you come to write this story?” I am frequently asked, whether it be this story, or that one over there, or the soft pink-and-white one in the corner. Usually, I shrug helplessly. My ideas come from the same places yours come from: Compulsion City, about half an hour out of Schenectady. I can’t give a more specific location than that. Once in a great while, I know specifically. The story that follows is one of those instances, and I will tell you. I attended the 22nd World Science Fiction Convention (Pacificon II) on Labor Day, 1964. For the past many “cons,” a feature has been a fan-art exhibit, with artwork entered by nonprofessionals from all over the science fiction world. Several times (for some as-yet-unexplained reason) I have been asked to be among the judges of this show, and have found the level of work to be pleasantly high, in some cases really remarkable. On half a dozen occasions I have found myself wondering why the certain illustrator that impressed me was not working deep in the professional scene; and within a year, invariably, that artist has left the amateur ranks and become a selling illustrator. At the Pacificon, once again I attended the fan-art exhibition. I was in the company of Robert Silverberg, a writer whose name will not be unfamiliar to you, and the then-editor of Amazing Stories, Cele Goldsmith Lalli (the Lalli had only recently been added, when that handsome bachelor lady finally threw in the sponge and married Mr. Lalli, in whose direction dirty looks for absconding with one of the ablest editors s-f had yet produced). Cele had been trying vainly to get a story out of me. I was playing coy. There had been days when the cent or cent-and-a-half Amazing Stories paid was mucho dinero to me, but now I was a Big-Time Hollywood Writer (it says here somewhere) and I was enjoying saying stupid things like, “You can’t afford me, Cele,” or “I’ll see if Joseph E. Levine will let me take off a week to write one for you … I’ll have my agent call you.” Cele was taking it staunchly. Since I was much younger, and periodically disrupted her efficient Ziff-Davis office, she had tolerated me with a stoic resign only faintly approached by the Colossus of Rhodes. “Okay, okay, big shot,” she was replying, “I’ll stretch it to two cents a word, and we both know you’re being overpaid.” I sneered and marched away. It was something of a ru