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Sentries walked along the rows and rows of sleeping men. Machines floated in the air above them, turning, twisting, their guns pointing now this way, now that, as if they, like the men, were also uneasy.
Two of the sentries walked beneath the “window” through which Gosseyn and Thorson gazed. One spoke to the other in a language Gosseyn had never heard before. He had already guessed that these were galactic soldiers, but the sound of their alien tongue jarred him, chilled him. Thorson’s voice came from near his shoulder, softly:
“They’re Altairans. We didn’t bother to give them the local language.”
Local language! Gosseyn took that in silence. The pictures that formed in his mind whenever he thought of a galactic empire and its myriad peoples were on a nonverbal level.
He was just begi
The machines woke up first. Long lines of floating blasters sent their sizzling fire at the attackers. Automatically aimed weapons added their thunder to the bedlam. There were shrieks, and men went down by the hundreds. And now the camp was waking up. Cursing soldiers leaped to their feet and clutched hand weapons. Men with swinging clubs grappled them, and as the minutes lengthened there were more and more men with clubs. Above the melee of battle, the automatic weapons stuttered uncertainly, as if they were no longer sure of just where they should fire. As the sizzling of the blasters and the thunder of the weapons lessened, the sound of men cursing and grunting and breathing came clearer.
It was the awkwardness of the fighting, the close-in awkwardness of it, that suddenly enlightened Gosseyn.
“My God,” he said, “is that fight going on in darkness?”
The question was rhetorical, for he could see now the difference between daylight and the daylight out there. This was a scene of the night taken by radaric cameras. From behind him, Thorson said thickly, “That’s where all weapons fail. Darkness. Every man has a device for seeing in the night, but it takes power to operate it, and you have to fit it into place.” He moaned with anger. “It’s enough to drive you mad, to watch those stupid fools acting like all the stupid soldiers that ever were.”
He raved on for another minute, then stopped. There was silence behind Gosseyn, and then Thorson spoke in a much calmer voice.
“What am I getting heated up about?” he said. “That attack took place the first night. It happened in every camp established by our soldiers. It was devastating, because no one expected unarmed hordes to attack one of the best equipped armies in the galaxy.”
Gosseyn scarcely heard. He watched the battle with utter fascination. The attackers now numbered thousands. Their dead lay sometimes three deep stretching from every tree. But they were not alone. Here and there in that overwhelmed camp galactic soldiers were still struggling.
Hand blasters still flashed with an occasional murderous thrust, but as often as not, now, the wielder was a Venusian null-A.
In ten minutes more, there was no doubt of the result. And army of determined men with clubs had seized a modern military camp with all its equipment.
XXIX
As the victorious Venusians began to dig graves for the dead, Thorson reached over and switched off the video. The light in the apartment brightened. He glanced matter of factly at his watch.
“I’ve got less than an hour before Crang comes,” he said.
He stood for a moment, frowning, then motioned at the blank wall where the video scene had been so vividly pictured a moment before.
“Naturally,” he said, “we rushed in reinforcements and they made no attempt to attack cities. But that wasn’t their purpose. They wanted weapons, and they got them. This is the fourth day of the invasion. As of this morning, more than twelve hundred of our spaceships have been captured and another thousand destroyed, countless weapons, have been seized and turned against us, and some two million of our men killed. To accomplish that the Venusians have lost ten million people—five million killed and another five million injured. But in my judgment their worst losses are over, whereas”—gloomily—“ours are just begi
He paused in the center of the room. His eyes were sullen. He chewed his lower lip savagely. At last darkly: “Gosseyn, it’s unheard of. There’s never been anything like it in the history of the galaxy. Conquered people or nations, even whole planetary groups, remain at home and the great mass always submits. They may hate the conqueror for a few generations, but if the propaganda is handled right, soon they take pride in their membership in a great empire.” He shrugged, muttered half to himself, “The tactics are routine.”
Gosseyn was thinking, “Ten million Venusian casualties in less than four days.” The figure was so enormous that he closed his eyes. Slowly, then, and grimly, he opened them again. He felt a great pride and a great sorrow. The philosophy of null-A was justified, proved, honored by its dead. As one man, Venusians had realized the situation, and without agreement, with no pre-pla
Gosseyn made an automatic estimate of how many billions of honest men there would be. The figures startled him, altered the flow of his thought. He stared at Thorson with narrowed eyes.
“Just a moment,” he said slowly. “What are you trying to put over? How could a galactic empire with more soldiers than there are people in the solar system be defeated in four days? Why shouldn’t they be able to supply virtually endless armies and if necessary exterminate every null-A on Venus?”
The expression on Thorson’s face was sardonic. “That,” he said, “was what I was talking about a little while ago.”
Without taking his gaze from Gosseyn’s face, the big man drew up a chair and sat down astride it, leaning his elbows on the back. There was an intentness in his ma
“My friend, think of it this way. The Greatest Empire—that is a literal translation, by the way, of the original word—is a member of a Galactic League. The other members outnumber us three to one, but we are the largest single power that has ever existed in time and space. Nevertheless, because of our League obligations, we can act only within certain limitations. We are signatories to treaties which forbid the use of a Distorter as we used it against the Machine. The treaties forbid the use of atomic energy except as a source of power and for a few other specified purposes. We destroyed the Machine with atomic torpedoes. True, they were very small ones, but atomic nonetheless. In the League lexicon, the greatest crime of all is genocide. If you kill five per cent of a population, that’s war. If you kill ten per cent, that’s slaughter, and subject to indemnities if you are convicted before the League. If you kill twenty per cent or twenty million, whichever is the greater, that is genocide. If that is proved against you, the government of the power involved is declared outlaw, and all those responsible have to be delivered to the League for trial and execution, if convicted. An automatic state of war exists until the terms have been carried out.”