ew of ... bonies.
     The Big Four didn't need all this special attention.
We were willing to hop down. Paratroopers of the
Infinite! We could suit up and use mini-rockets to
come in like mini-spaceships. With a bit of luck we
wouldn't smash ourselves to a fine red spray--an
appropriate death with Mars hovering over our heads,
like the god of war.
     Now for the first time Commander Taylor allowed
herself to be testy with her marine passengers. "This
is no time for a gung-ho kamikaze operation! The
mission is a failure if you die before you meet what's
on the other side of the Gate. We know how impor-
tant your mission is and that the Bova is expendable.
Why do you think we carted a few UAC goodies along
just for you? Finding UAC stuff isn't easy anymore
but you need every advantage. And remember that we
will remain in this area until you return. If Phobos is
too dangerous, we'll wait farther out. When any of
you return from the mission, you will be greeted by
someone ... unless all of us are dead. Meanwhile,
you will have the safest passage to Phobos that it is
within my power to grant. Now not another word
about paratrooping in."
     She'd made such a big production out of it that I
took my chance for Albert to finally see a space
skipper do her stuff; and I wasn't averse to getting an
eyeful myself. The landing took a full hour once
Taylor was in position to touch down ever so gently on
the moon. I wasn't nervous, even though "Phobos"
means "fear."
     Hidalgo took command with grace. I was starting to
feel more comfortable about him. I wasn't sure what
had changed. He'd had us keep our gear in top
condition aboard the Bova, but he hadn't been neu-
rotic about it. Plus there was only so much exacting
inspection he could do in the near-dark.
     Hidalgo was beginning to assume his proper place
in the pecking order as the fire team commander. The
problem he had was that this position should have
been held by the team member with the most combat
experience. For this war, that narrowed down the list
to two living marines: Fly and me. Next came Albert
because he'd fought the monsters with us, close up
and dirty. When Colonel Hooker saddled us with
Hidalgo the test immediately became: is he an asset or
extra baggage? I liked traveling light.
     This was the last place for a know-it-all to try to
assume command. Fly and I had the most firsthand
information and we were still shooting in the dark
most of the time. Hidalgo asked the right questions.
He listened. Even though we'd never had the oppor-
tunity to train together to the point where we could
operate as one perfect fighting machine, three of us
did have this seasoning. With some applied intelli-
gence, Hidalgo could be the brain.
     Fly and I had worked out the route. Captain
Hidalgo sent us in doing a simple echelon formation,
with Albert taking the point. Then came Fly, then
Hidalgo, and I brought up the rear. I kind of liked it
that my beloved and I were doing all the security
sweep area between us.
     Albert was a good marksman and he had a brand
new Sig-Cow. He rilled out his space suit better than
the rest of us. We'd worried there might not be one to
fit him, but the mission had been too well planned for
that. Naturally, Albert's suit was at the bottom of the
pile.
     Seeing him from behind was like watching him
grow in height as he looked up at Mars. The distant
sun didn't illuminate the scenery too well, but the
Bova would light our way as we searched for the right
facility. Mars looked more orange than red to me; at
least it did in this light. I'm sure that Albert would
have loved it if it had been the color of a spoiled
pumpkin--pie, that is.
     It felt strange to deliberately reenter hell.
Half-normal gravity returned. The lights were on.
My heart sank, and not from putting on weight all of a
sudden. Since the gravity zones were still functioning,
I figured the enemy must still be around. This conclu-
sion might not have been entirely rational, though.
The gravity zones had been operating long before the
enemy arrived. It was possible the things couldn't be
turned off. Call it woman's intuition, but I figured the
red meanies would have trashed everything somehow
if they didn't need it anymore.
     The next second I was proved 100 percent right. I
hate it when that happens. I saw the flying skull before
anyone else did, zooming in at four o'clock.
Thank God we had our radios on. We'd discussed,
and rejected, the possibility of maintaining radio
silence for security and only talking by putting our
helmets together. If we'd been that paranoid, the
others wouldn't have heard me. In space they hear
you scream only when your radio is on.
     "Look out!"
Albert nailed the sucker before it could chow down
on the material of his pressure suit. We hadn't had
time to find out what currently passed for air here.
The .30-caliber slugs did the job, and the skull
skidded over to the nearest access-tube ladder. Down
it went.
     I wasn't the least bit surprised when a moment later
Fly announced, "The test is positive. We can breathe
the air."
     "Remove helmets," Hidalgo ordered calmly. The
suits were well designed for our purposes. The hel-
mets hung in back, leaving our hands free so that we
wouldn't be impeded while we added to the body
count. Or head count, as the case might be.
     "If everything's as we left it," I blurted out after my
first gulp of base air, "we can expect a lot of opposi-
tion before we reach the Gate."
     "Take it easy, Corporal Sanders," said Captain
Hidalgo.
     "Yes, sir." He was acting as if he knew his business.
"We'll handle them," he said. "That's why we're
armed with state-of-the-art boom sticks." Another try
at humor. This had started with his friendship with
Lieutenant Riley. I didn't know how long it would
last, but I kind of liked it.
     Hidalgo gave the orders. We followed. Of course,
the orders were based on our accurately locating the
correct Gate.
     We encountered no opposition for the next fifteen
minutes. We did find a functioning lift that appeared
to have been repaired with pieces of a steam demon. I
didn't like the idea of using it but Hidalgo made the
decision. Halfway down the shaft I could see through
a ragged hole in the wall that the ladder I would have
gone down ended in a tangle of spaghetti.
     The makings of a reception committee waited for
us at the bottom. If the skull had contacted them
before we wasted it, they might have caused us some
trouble. By this time, I thought I'd seen it all. I was
wrong again.
     Occupying the center of the room was an almost
intact spider-mind. All that was missing was the head.
In the smashed dome on top, where normally resided
the evil brain-face, two spinies were doing something.
They almost seemed to be laughing, and I could
understand why Fly called them imps.
     They were eating. When one of the imps looked up
from his meal, I could see gray and red splotches on
his brown face. Bits of gore dripped off the white
horns sticking out from his body. Then he lifted one
of his claws, and I saw what was dripping from it.
I was grateful Captain Hidalgo had ordered us to
remove our helmets. I couldn't help throwing up, a
reaction that surprised me. Why should my stomach
churn at the sight of imps devouring a spider-mind?
I'd seen far worse things happen to human beings and
not lost my cookies.
     I guess I'd reached a new level of disgust, though I
didn't think there was anywhere lower. The imp saw
us at about the same moment we saw him. Instinc-
tively he threw one of his patented fireballs, but he
forgot he was still holding on to a dripping chunk of
spider tissue. The gory piece of bug brains caught fire,
and the imp was scorched by his own flame.
     By now the other imp figured out what was happen-
ing. He was smarter than his brother and did some-
thing I would have thought impossible. The spider's
gun turret rotated in our direction and started spitting
out its venom: 30mm rounds.
     We would have been in trouble if it had been an
actual spider-mind. But we had one of Commander
Taylor's presents. While I zigged, Fly zagged. Albert
and Hidalgo did their part by staying alive. The show
belonged to Fly.
     I never thought I'd see a BFG 9000 again, the
crown jewel of UAC's weapons division. Three blasts
would take care of a fully operational spider-mind.
One blast proved more than sufficient for the imps
who had themselves a great tank but weren't properly
trained to use it.
     "Praise the Lord!" shouted Albert.
"And pass the ammunition," said Fly, sweat bead-
ing on his forehead and a big grin growing under-
neath.
     "Better than a chain saw," was my on-the-spot
report.
     "Regroup," said Hidalgo. "It'll be a shame to lose
that fine weapon when we go through the Gate."
Albert tried for optimism. "Maybe we could leave it
on the other side for when we return?"
     "We could never risk that," answered the captain.
"This place is crawling with vermin. We don't want
them to get their claws on this weapon."
     None of us said aloud the obvious: If we return.
The plan we'd made with the Bova was "no news is
bad news." By now they knew we weren't alone on
this rock. We'd continue observing radio silence be-
tween ourselves and the ship.
     Fly summed up the situation. He's always good at
doing that. "We've seen this place when it was crawl-
ing, Captain. Right now it's almost deserted. I don't
have any idea why or how long it will last, though. It
could be swarming again by this time tomorrow."
"Commander Taylor and Lieutenant Riley know
     the risks," he said, which struck me as a little odd.
Seemed to me that the primary subject on the table
right now was the fire team.
     "Then we're enjoying good fortune," said Albert--
a bit pompously, I thought. A problem I've always
had when I fall for someone is that I become hyper-
critical. I think Fly has this problem as well.
Hidalgo gave us the word, and we moved on. I was
astonished that I hadn't fired my plasma rifle yet. But
it's wrong to wish for such things. I'm just supersti-
tious enough to believe that you get exactly what you
wish for.
     My opportunity to test my weapon came with the
appearance of a new monster. I hate new monsters.
This one I mistook for a pumpkin. There were plenty
of similarities: big round floating head, one eye, a
gasbag with satanic halitosis.
     The differences, partly obscured by a sudden
change in the light, were most annoying. We might
have become a little lazy. We had the best weapons,
and the opposition was thin. Seeing a round thing
come floating around the corner seemed almost too
easy. One lousy pumpkin. Who was going to lay dibs
on it? Who would have the pleasure of hosing it?
Hidalgo's reflexes might have been a little off, as
well. He hadn't experienced Phobos when the shit
storm came down nonstop. Even so, he got off a shot
with his Sig-Cow. Some of the shots connected.
He'd succeeded in getting the thing's attention. It
returned fire. I expected the usual: lightning balls. But
this one had a surprise in its gullet. We were treated to
a stream of flying skulls pouring out of its mouth,
each one as nasty as the one Albert had shot out of the
sky a short time before.
     But now the sky was full of them.



     19

     The colors started shifting. That was a new
trick. The corridor went from normal light to blue
and then red, distracting us just enough so we
wouldn't notice that this pumpkin was something
other than a pumpkin. As its single eye focused on
me, my only thought was that here we had a larger
than usual pumpkin. As it vomited out the first flying
skull, I still didn't understand what was happening. I
had the dumb idea that it had eaten one of the smaller
heads and couldn't keep it down. (Down what?)
As a second and third skull came zooming out of
the ugly mouth, I started to read the picture. The first
skull reached me before I could bring up the BFG. I
heard Arlene shout, "Fly," just as I did the next best
thing to shooting the little bugger: I kept it from
taking a bite out of my shoulder by swinging around
so that it collided with my helmet. There was a metal-
on-metal sound as it dented the helmet and bounced
off, making itself a perfect target for Hidalgo, who
popped it.
     Around about now we lost count of the skulls that
filled the narrow corridor. It looked as if we'd
knocked over a basket of candy skulls from Mexico's
Day of the Dead celebrations ... but there was noth-
ing sweet about our tormentors.
     Hidalgo froze for a few seconds. That was all. A
brief moment of battlefield shock. If we lived, I could
count on Arlene chewing my ear about it. And I could
hear myself answering that we hadn't scored all that
high in the reflexes department on this one. If we
lived.
     "I'll try for the pumpkin!" I shouted. The BFG
9000 would do the job--if I could just get a clear
shot. The problem wasn't finding an opening through
the skulls--the blast would pulverize them--the
problem was to make sure that Albert was outside the
field of fire.
     Meanwhile, the others didn't need to be told to
eliminate the flying skulls. No problem. There was
only a zillion of 'em. Hidalgo proved himself worthy
of command yet again. He didn't say a word. He was
too busy blasting away with his Sig-Cow, taking down
his quota.
     Arlene provided Albert and Hidalgo with a helpful
safety tip: "Don't let them bite you!" She shouted this
over the sound of her plasma rifle. She almost took
down the main problem with her first blast, which
went through three skulls. But this particular pump-
kin was smart. The damned thing floated back around
the corner where we'd first sighted its ugly mug. Then
it kept spewing out skulls from its more protected
position--a clever move, I had to admit.
     Of course, the solution was obvious. I realized that
I didn't really need a clear shot for the BFG if I could
just see the target area. I blew away the entire wall and
destroyed the ugly. Then, just for good measure, I
pulled the trigger again. As the debris settled, I
realized that I'd dropped half the skulls with those
two shots, and the others were bumping into
     each other in the dust-filled air. This finally set-
tled a question for me: the bastards didn't have ra-
dar.
     The little voice in the back of my head insisted we
were in too close quarters for using a weapon like the
BFG. I couldn't hear anything else because of the
ringing in my head, so I argued with the voice,
reminding it that once upon a time I'd done a much
crazier thing--I'd used a rocket launcher in an en-
closed area.
     The voice didn't have a good answer to that, and by
then I could hear Arlene cursing a blue streak. She
was bent over Hidalgo, her medikit open. Albert
stood over the two of them, blasting the remaining
skulls out of the corridor. I felt a little dizzy but
managed to stumble over to rejoin the human popula-
tion of hell.
     At least one of the skulls had reached the captain
and ripped up his throat something fierce. Hidalgo's
torn space suit had a whole new meaning now:
walking body bag. Arlene was doing what she could,
but there was damned little hope for the captain. It
looked as if we'd be finishing the mission sans officer.
The way Arlene was feverishly working on Hidalgo it
was hard to believe she'd ever talked about spacing
his ass out an airlock. There's no substitute for being
in combat together.
     The last skull was either down or had flown the
coop, but Albert remained on guard. I was grateful
that the colors had stopped shifting, and I wondered if
the light show had been part of this superpumpkin's
powers. Whatever the facts might be, I'd become
distinctly prejudiced against round things that floated
through the air. They seemed to live in a permanent
condition of zero-g. That was enough reason to hate
them right there.
     As we milled around helplessly, watching Arlene try
to close the wound in Hidalgo's throat, I noticed
Albert tense up. He raised his Sig-Cow to fire at
something that was drifting in the air behind us.
Naturally, I assumed it was another skull.
     The last thing I expected to see this side of paradise
was a blue sphere drifting toward us. A gorgeous,
beautiful, welcome blue sphere. One of those miracles
that had saved both my life and Arlene's. A blue
sphere that Albert was seconds away from blowing to
kingdom come.
     "No!" I shouted, pushing his arm at the same time.
Good thing I acted as I spoke. It was too late to stop
him from pulling the trigger, but I spoiled his aim.
I couldn't remember if Arlene or I had told Albert
about the blue spheres. It was pretty likely we had.
But in the middle of a fight you don't expect the new
guy to hesitate on the off chance it's not an enemy
coming to say hello. It was only dumb luck I was
saved the first time I encountered one.
     Luck. Back to luck. How in the name of all the
saints did this baby show up at the precise moment
Hidalgo needed it? Arlene and I had just run across
ours. This one was making a house call.
     "It's a good one," I told Albert. "Like an angel. The
blue spheres can heal us."
     He lowered his weapon, and I gestured for Arlene to
step back. Not one to waste a precious second, Albert
reloaded. I moved out of the way, too. The blue
sphere descended on Hidalgo, who wasn't the least bit
worried; he'd blacked out from loss of blood.
The sphere burst the moment it touched him,
     making a popping sound like a cork coming out of a
bottle. The color became darker as it spread, changing
from sky-blue to a rich purple. Hidalgo was sur-
rounded by a violet haze that became a glistening
liquid on his body and then seeped through his pores.
The ugly hole in his throat closed like two lips pressed
together, and his face flushed as new blood pumped
through his body.
     A few minutes later he opened his blue eyes and
regarded us with surprise. "What happened?" he
asked.
     Arlene did her best to tell him.
He gratefully sipped water from the canteen she
passed to him. "Incredible," he admitted, speaking
more slowly than normal. He sat up against the wall.
Albert continued on his watch.
     "We need to move," I said, once again possibly
usurping his prerogatives. I remembered how sleepy
I'd been after receiving the treatment.
     "Let's get a move on," he said, struggling to his
feet. "How far do we have to go?"
     "Only a few klicks," said Arlene.
We moved out, Albert leading the way again. Hidal-
go, growing stronger with every step, asked the obvi-
ous question as his brain began firing on all cylinders
again: "The blue balls didn't seek the two of you out
when you were here before, did they?"
     "No," Arlene and I said in stereo.
"Then why would this one deliberately come to my
aid?"
     We walked in silence. We had no ready answer.
Only more questions. Then I had a thought. That
happens sometimes.
     "When it happened to me, it bugged the hell out of
me," I told Hidalgo. "Even though mine didn't go out
of its way to save my butt. There was an important
piece of information I didn't have then."
     Arlene smiled. The old lightbulb clicked on right
over her head. "The aliens who sent the message," she
said.
     "Right," I continued. "It never made sense that our
enemies would fabricate these incredible monsters
and then throw in a few Florence Nightingales to
patch us up. Now I know better. The blue spheres are
not here courtesy of the Freds."
     "The good guys sent them," marveled Arlene, the
same thought taking up residence in her cranium.
"You were right to call them angels," said Albert.
Hidalgo nodded. "If that's true, then they must
want all of us to make this trip." Unconsciously he
stroked his own throat, where there was not even a
scar.
     We reached the Gate without encountering any
more opposition. The creepy critters had been busy
playing architect again. I should have expected some-
thing like that, considering how they were constantly
altering the appearance of the different levels.
The Gate was decorated in a sort of late neo-satanic
style. All they'd left out was gargoyles. If they wanted
that last touch, they only had to look in a mirror. The
basic addition appeared to be a huge stone doughnut
jammed into the ground so that it formed a doorway
with the grid right in the middle. All sorts of weird
crap was carved into it.
     The monsters had no taste at all. Guess that goes
with being a monster. The dips had put two horns on
top of this horror, one on either side of the "head."
Adding insult to injury, they had placed two big
stupid eyes on the semicircle of stone in relation to
the horns so that even the dumbest grunt would pick
up on the subtle idea: a giant demon head with the
Gateway for its mouth.
     I was prepared to laugh out loud, but I thought
better of it. Chortling didn't seem like a very nice
thing to do while a good friend was freaking out.
"Moloch!" Albert screamed. His eyes were wide,
and he was foaming at the mouth.
     As a top fire team, we still had a few bugs to iron
out.



     20

     Albert was too good a man to lose his grip
now. As his commanding officer, I couldn't stand by
and let him dissolve into a puddle. The team needed a
leader.
     This was always a danger when taking command in
a dicey situation. The survivors could bond too much.
I had realized the truth of this when I stopped feeling
suicidal. After they pulled me back from my own
dipdunk and told me how the blue angel had saved
me, I was so grateful that I said a prayer. I did this
silently, of course. That way I know God heard me.
I could truly understand Gallatin's reaction to the
sight of the graven image. My parents took me to a
horror film when I was only six, one of the dozens of
movies about the Aztec mummy. The monster didn't
really frighten me; but the sight of young maidens
being sacrificed by evil priests gave me nightmares for
a week. Their idol looked like Moloch.
     As I grew older, I began seeking out the image of
Moloch. I found it in the old silent German movie,
Metropolis, and it showed up in a frightening picture
about devil worship. But I'll never forget how effec-
tively it was used in the movie they used to make the
transition from the old series, Star Trek Ten, to the
new one, Star Trek: Exodus.
     These strange creatures we fought were apparently
able to crawl inside our minds and extract the most
terrifying images from the human past. Fighting
mirror images of your own nightmares had to be bad
for morale. Sergeant Taggart and Lance Corporal
Sanders were watching me as I watched Gallatin.
Taggart started toward him, but I gave the order not
to touch him.
     "Gallatin," I said, keeping my voice low. "Snap out
of it, marine."
     He seemed to hear me as if I'd called to him across
a vast gulf. His eyes were glazed. But he stopped
making noises ill befitting a marine.
     "Look," I said, pointing at the ground. "There are
no human bones here. There is no fire in the maw
waiting for human slaves to shovel in human food."
There was, in fact, a solitary skull staring at us with
empty sockets, but even the blind could see there was
nothing remotely human about it.
     Gallatin calmed down. "I fouled up, sir!" he said in
his old, strong voice. I was damned glad. If words
didn't work, the next step would have been to trade
punches. Gallatin was no coward. He would never cut
and run. If he went nuts and stayed nuts, he'd have to
be put down.
     "This is the Gate," said Fly, checking his coordi-
nates.
     "Why do you think they dressed it up for Hallow-
een?" I asked anyone who wanted to answer.
     "It's what they do," Sanders volunteered, keeping
her eye on Gallatin the whole time. I didn't blame
her. So far, their feelings for each other hadn't inter-
fered with the mission. If there was a time for her to
blow it, this would have been it.
     "Gives me the creepy crawlies," I admitted.
"It's Lovecraftian," added Sanders.
     "Oh, no," said Taggart. "Just don't say it's el-
dritch."
     If I hadn't returned from the dead, thanks to the
blue angel, I would have put a stop to the banter.
Normally I'm a stickler for protocol, but death had
provided me with new insight. (Sanders said I was
only near death, but I know better.) We weren't on
such a tight timetable that we couldn't spare a few
minutes. Up to this point, Taggart and Sanders had
been our guides, but once we stepped through that
portal, they would be no more experienced than the
rest of us. No one had a clue what to expect. We had
orders. Hope was allowed.
     "I'd never describe that as eldritch," she threw back
at Taggart. "I'd only observe the lurid shimmering
about the base of the stygian masonry; and how
overhanging our fevered brows leer abhorrent, arcane
symbols threatening our very sanity with portents of
an unwholesome, subterraneous wickedness."
     "Well, okay," Taggart said, surrendering. "Just so
long as you don't describe it as eldritch."
     This moment of R&R was no excuse to lay off work.
Since the Marine Corps had failed to provide us with
eyes in the backs of our heads, I ordered a modified
defensive diamond. Half of one. All four of us
couldn't very well cover the four cardinal directions.
Two of us had to prepare for the trip. Then we
switched the duo.
     My pressure suit was torn around the neck where
the skull-thing had bitten me. Taggart's helmet was
damaged but still usable; the dent in the side did not
prevent his getting it over his head, and the faceplate
wasn't cracked. The only suit likely to leak was mine.
At my query, Taggart repeated his belief that the suits,
weapons, and everything else not of woman born
would not make it through. The preparations might
be a waste of time, but I wasn't going into the
unknown leaving anything undone. We'd be foolish to
assume anything.
     Making bets was another thing entirely. The odds
were entirely on Sergeant Flynn Taggart's side. That's
why I asked one last time what it had been like for
him the last time he went through a Gate.
     He reported: "I retained consciousness, sir. You
don't worry if your equipment is still in your hands
because you don't have any hands. There's no sensa-
tion of having a body at all. Then suddenly pieces of
you come back. It's like you think of them and you're
whole again; or maybe it's the other way around. Hard
to tell."
     "Were you awake and standing when you reached
the other side?"
     "Standing, sir!"
We'd covered the same ground before, but we
     weren't under attack at the moment. I liked going
through the checklist one last time. And now our time
was up.
     I gave the command. "Move it, marines!" We
humped into the mouth of Moloch.
     At first there was a sensation of moving, of motion,
a light drop, or a dropping into the light ... but it's
hard to see without eyes. We had no hallucinations,
though. Our minds were our own. You can just say no
to hallucinations, but you need a tongue to say no.
Know what I mean?
     ESTEBAN HIDALGO: Does anyone hear my voice? I
hear it, but I don't have ears. You didn't say we could
communicate while traveling through the Gate, Ser-
geant Taggart.
     FLYNN TAGGART: Never traveled in a group before,
sir! Arlene and I went separately on the Gate trip
from Phobos to Deimos. The Gates are different from
the short-hop teleports.
     ARLENE SANDERS: You can say that again, Fly!
HIDALGO: I've never experienced either. Which do
you prefer, Sergeant?
     TAGGART: I'm not sure, sir! Anything that doesn't
require using a stupid plastic key card to pass through
a secret door is fine with me. Last time I was on
Phobos, I really hated that.
     HIDALGO: This is annoying enough for me, Ser-
geant.
     ALBERT GALLATIN: I like being here.
SANDERS: Albert? You don't feel you've been sacri-
ficed to Moloch?
     GALLATIN: The opposite. This is wonderful. It's
better than sex.
     SANDERS: Well, I'll grant you it's up there.
HIDALGO: What do you think about that, Sergeant
Taggart?
     TAGGART: About what, sir?
HIDALGO: Do you think this disembodied condition
is better than sex?
     TAGGART: Nothing is better than a clearly deline-
ated chain of command, sir!
     HIDALGO: Is that sarcasm, Sergeant?
TAGGART: No, sir!
     HIDALGO: I don't like this experience. How much
longer do you expect it to take?
     SANDERS: May I answer that, sir?
HIDALGO: You are both veterans of Gate travel,
Lance Corporal.
     SANDERS: Time has no meaning here.
TAGGART: There is no here here.
     HIDALGO: I was afraid you'd say that.
TAGGART: Since we don't know how far we're travel-
ing, or how fast, there is no way to calculate anything,
sir!
     GALLATIN: Permission to speak, sir?
HIDALGO: Tell you what. While we are in this
whatever-it-is, we can drop all formalities. No one has
to call me sir. Now, what did you want to ask me?
GALLATIN: If we encounter God, should we address
him as sir?
     HIDALGO: In case the answer is no, I'm more com-
fortable with dropping the formalities. Did you hear
that, Fly?
     TAGGART: Yes.
HIDALGO: You are good at following orders.
     TAGGART: Yes.
HIDALGO: I'd like to thank all of you for saving my
life.
     TAGGART: It was the blue sphere.
HIDALGO: Perhaps you willed it to appear.
     SANDERS: That's occurred to me, too.
HIDALGO: Strange to be brought back from the dead
by a creature I didn't see.
     SANDERS: While you were unconscious, you didn't
see the face on the sphere.
     HIDALGO: I was dead. I saw the light. The sphere
had a face?
     TAGGART: I wonder if any of our hosts at the end of
this journey will have a face like that? It didn't look
like any of the doom demons.
     HIDALGO: Doom?
TAGGART: We call them that sometimes, after we
found out the invasion was called Doom Day.
     GALLATIN: Did you feel that?
SANDERS: Can we feel anything?
     GALLATIN: I felt something warm. I feel as if I'm
back on the Bova . . . weightless. Must have a body to
feel that.
     SANDERS: Wait. I feel something. But it's cool, not
warm. I feel as if I'm in free fall, also.
     HIDALGO: Maybe our journey is nearing its end.
NOT HIDALGO-TAGGART-SANDERS-GALLATIN: Your
     journey ended a long time ago. You wouldn't be
having a conversation if you were in transit.
HIDALGO: What? Who's that?
     TAGGART: That's not a voice.
SANDERS: It's not an identity--not one of us.
GALLATIN: Are you a spirit?
     NOT HIDALGO-TAGGART-SANDERS-GALLATIN: We are
the reception committee. You had a long journey, a
long sleep. You are only now returning.
     TAGGART: But we are experiencing what happens
toward the end of Gate travel.
     NOT H-T-S-G: No, you are remembering the sensa-
tions accompanying the transitional state. The jour-
ney is over. You have arrived. To reassemble, you
must begin with your last memories. You must be
aided through the psychotic episode.
     HIDALGO: Psychotic . . .
TAGGART: Episode?
     NOT H-T-S-G: The fantasy. The death fantasy. Do
not concern yourselves. Reassembly is.
     HIDALGO: If we have arrived somewhere, may we be
informed where?
     NOT H-T-S-G: Here the many meet and diplomacy
greets. The True Aesthetic welcomes you. Sirs, sirs,
sirs, sirs!
     TAGGART: Something tells me we've been talking on
a party line.



     21

     I've never been able to explain to Arlene why
I'm so convinced there's a God. She lives in a world of
logic and science. Mysteries bother her. They are
problems to be solved; and she insists on a certain
type of answer in advance. Her stubbornness only
makes me love her more.
     I'm not stupid. I realize the object hanging over my
head is no angelic being. But lying on my back and
watching the slow movements of the gossamer crea-
ture with flashing jewel eyes I feel a deep calm. The
butterfly things that flutter around its flower-shaped
head are attracted to the eyes, as I am attracted. The
gossamer being eats the small flitting creatures.
This flying alien is no animal. It is a genius of its
kind. But it pays no attention to me. If poor Dr.
Ackerman had lived and joined us on this mission, he
would have fulfilled his life's ambitions. The alien
base contains a remarkable collection of geniuses; it
was a sort of a galactic Mensa.
     I haven't been able to find out where we are, but I'll
keep asking. The only problem with this place is that
most of the gossamer creatures completely ignore us.
That's one development I never expected--aliens
who are simply bored with us.
     The bad part is how their attitude rubs off. I'm
bored with us. If this keeps up, I'll lose my desire to
shoot things. Never mind what that means for my
career in the marines. We Mormons believe in a
warrior god, warrior angels, warriors, but there's not a
single fiery sword anywhere in this whole gigantic
habitat. What's a fella to do?
     I know. I'll make friends with some of the natives.
There must be somebody in this burg who'll show a
new guy a good time.
     "It's good to have our bodies again," said Arlene
over a cup of H2O and a plate of little red eyeballs.
They weren't really eyeballs. But then, they weren't
really red either.
     "Not bad," I agreed. "I think I lost a few pounds."
"Fly, there aren't any extra pounds on you."
I shook my head. "Our vacation in Hawaii put a
few extra pounds on the old carcass."
     "Not that I ever noticed," she said in her friendliest
voice. "You know, Fly, I feel as if I'm on vacation
now."
     So did I. It was hard to believe we were on an alien
base God knew where. We were sitting at a table
floating in the air between us. We were not in zero-g,
but the table sort of was. I'd never sat in a more com-
fortable chair. It altered its shape to accommodate
my slightest move. We'd taken our pills and were now
enjoying the best human dinner available to us. The
only one.
     "Captain Hidalgo is not on vacation," I pointed
out. There had been a problem with him. The strange
entity we called a medbot had told us that Hidalgo's
brain and body were not yet in harmony, but they
would be. Whenever we asked the medbot how much
time it would take for Hidalgo to be on his feet again,
the eye of the robot seemed to wink at us, and the
thing produced equations in the air. To be honest, I
wasn't completely certain it was a machine, but
Arlene insisted it had to be.
     Arlene understood one statement, which put her
kilometers ahead of Yours Truly. She said that in
quantum physics there is no such thing as absolute
time; there is only time relative to the location and
speed of the observer.
     I'd settle for finding out how much longer it would
take for Hidalgo to rejoin us. There was no one I
could ask about when Albert might come out of his
mood.
     Arlene seemed to read my thoughts again. Maybe in
this place she really could. "Albert's not on vacation
either."
     "At least he's all right."
"Physically, yes, but I've never seen him in such a
strange mood before."
     "He told me he was meditating."
She shook her head. "He told me he was trying to
communicate."
     "That may be the same thing with these critters. We
could spend the remainder of our lives attempting to
adjust and never get anywhere."
     I remembered coming back into my body. When we
had eyes again, I saw the naked forms of Arlene,
Albert, and Hidalgo. We weren't alone. There were
aliens with us, but my reactions were off. I didn't even
worry about whether the aliens had weapons or were
menacing us in any manner. I'd undergone a change
in perspective unlike anything that happened when I
Gate-traveled before. I perceived the naked bodies of
my fellow human beings with a completely new
objectivity. I figured the difference had more to do
with where we were than how we arrived.
     I didn't feel desire for Arlene. I wasn't judgmental
about the bodies of the two other men. I didn't feel
any locker-room embarrassment or competition. But
I wasn't indifferent. I was curious about the human
body, as though I were seeing it for the first time. I felt
the same way about the aliens, whose strange forms
were suddenly no stranger than the fleshy bipeds
called human beings.
     The oddity of the moment was the medbot, who
was all the reception committee we rated. It looked
like a barber pole with an attitude. When Hidalgo
collapsed, none of us rushed to his aid. We were still
in that weird frame of mind, which I can describe
only as objectivity. For the moment there was no
strike team of marines.
     The medbot scooped up Hidalgo's prostrate form,
but it didn't tell us anything about his condition. The
weird thing was that none of us asked. If the room had
been crawling with spider-minds, our trigger fingers
wouldn't have twitched; there was nothing to aim
anyway.
     Slowly we had found ourselves again. It was like
returning to a house you'd left in childhood and
exploring each room again as an adult. Only this
house was your own body. As we became less alien to
ourselves, the real aliens seemed stranger.
     Arlene had the guts to make the first move. Too bad
she didn't accomplish anything.
     "I've always said you're the bravest man I know,
Arlene. I was still staring into my navel when you
tried to strike up a conversation with the . . . others."
"Well, you've always been a navel man," she said.
Catching my expression, she added, "Didn't you hear
the e, Fly? You're too much of a marine to fit into any
other service."
     Yep, we were back to normal. That didn't seem to
be getting us anywhere in this galactic Hilton they
called a base. Maybe we shouldn't be complaining.
We were alive. The medbot had seen to that and had
answered most of our medical questions. There were
some questions it simply couldn't answer, though,
about where and what and who and why. These were
outside its field of competence. But I'd find someone
to tell us where we were.
     The medbot dodged only one question, when Ar-
lene asked how come it spoke flawless English. "The
English of this unit is not without flaw," it said fussily.
When she came right out and asked how come it
spoke English of any kind, it said, "Guild secret," and
changed the subject back to our biological questions!
We had plenty of those.
     "How do you think this food compares to MREs?"
I asked Arlene as she chomped down on one of the
little balls that looked like eyes to me but reminded
her of a different portion of human anatomy.
"Heated or cold?"
     "Cold, like we had on the Bova"
"Better."
     "Hot."
She shrugged. "Close call. But I'm not criticizing
the chef. We can eat this."
     "The medbot says the provider of the feast wants to
meet us. And he's not really a chef; he's more a
chemist."
     She took another healthy gulp of water. We'd both
become quite fond of water.
     "I'll meet with anyone," she said, and I nodded.
When she addressed the various creatures surround-
ing us at our arrival they had turned their backs on
us--the ones who had backs--and wandered off. At
first I thought we were being snubbed. But that wasn't
it at all. The show was over. They'd seen what they
wanted and had better things to do.
     "Do you think the chef is one of the aliens who sent
the message?"
     "God, I hope so!" When someone as atheistic as
Arlene invoked the name of God, I knew she was
speaking from the heart. I felt the same way. What
could be more pointless than traveling so far--and
one of these damned aliens was going to tell me how
far if I had to wrestle it out of him--and find no one
on the other end who gave a flip?
     "We know the chef helped the medbot work out the
details of our body chemistry, so it's a safe bet he
wants us alive."
     The first thing we learned from the animated barber
pole was that everyone on the base was a carbon-
based life-form. For all I knew, there wasn't any other
kind. So far, everyone we'd met was also the same on
both sides of the invisible vertical line or, as Arlene
would say, bilaterally symmetrical. I was grateful for
two things: Earth-normal gravity and reentering the
oxygen breathers' club! But that didn't mean we
might not run into some other problems. Hidalgo sure
did.
     So it made sense that they'd kept all of us on ice, in
some sort of limbo, until they were sure we'd be all
right in the environment of the base. When Arlene
and I went through the Phobos Gate to Deimos we
were traveling between artificial zones that were
terrestrial-friendly. That was good news for us. When
you're naked at the other end, you better hope you
can breathe the air and your skin can take it. I was
damned glad they could handle human specimens
here. I just hoped Captain Hidalgo would pull
through.
     "Don't you like the food?" Arlene asked, noticing
that I'd left half my meal unfinished.
     "It's okay. The truth is, I'm not really hungry. My
stomach spent so much time in zero-g aboard the
Bova that it's taking its time returning to normal. Plus
I'll let you in on something."
     "What?" she asked, leaning forward conspiratori-
ally.
     "Practice makes perfect. They'll improve at making
food for us."
     She stretched like a cat. "Fine with me," she said.
"Who would have thought the hardest part of keeping
us alive would be feeding us?"
     The medbot had sounded proud when it rattled off
the information. Their first analyses had told them
most of what they needed to know, but not every-
thing. They knew we needed calories, proteins, amino
acids, vitamins, but they did not know the proper
combinations or amounts! The big problem for our
hosts was figuring out how to synthesize the amino
acids we eat.
     This was a subject about which I was plenty igno-
rant. Ever since I started blowing away imps and
zombies and ugly demons of all descriptions, my
education had been improving. Fighting monsters
must be the next best thing to reading your way
through the public library. They both beat going to
college, if I could judge from the usual butthead who
thought he was hot snot because he dragged part of
the alphabet behind his name.
     The medbot was a bit technical in its non-flawless
English but "Dr. Sanders" helped me pick up the
basic points. The alien chef took some of his own food
and injected it with human amino acid combinations.
The first attempts were served to a high-tech garbage
disposal. Arlene rambled a little about random com-
binations of four amino acids, then reached her
climax.
     The ropy things on the barber pole began to throb,
and out of the top came a bottle of white pills, a
present from the alien gourmet. We'd have to take
those pills if we wanted to live.
     The pills were blockers. While experimenting con-
tinued in the higher cuisine, the pills would increase
the safety margin. Where had we heard that before?
They would chemically block anything harmful.
Without them we were doomed.
     Naturally I wanted to meet our benefactor as much
as Arlene did. We'd exhausted the possibilities of
conversation with the medical barber pole. So when
the medbot told us we could meet our favorite alien
we were eager to tote that barge, lift that bale, swim
the highest mountain . . . whatever.
     The medbot's instructions were clear. "The next
time you eat, stay in the place where you eat." So we
did. We didn't have any important date to break.
Arlene had tried to talk Albert into joining us, but his
appetite seemed even smaller than mine. He was off
meditating again. Seemed like brooding to me. I
wouldn't call it sulking. Hidalgo was still under
medical supervision. So Arlene and I were the ones
who attended the great meeting between worlds.
"Look!" said Arlene, stifling a gasp.
     The chef was coming. The chemist was coming.
The alien who gave a rat's ass about us was striding up
the silver walkway, and he seemed eager to meet us.
We could tell from his very human smiles. Two
smiles, exactly the same, because he was a they--
identical twins moving in unison. They were more
than twins. They were mirror images of each other.
Arlene started to laugh. I tried to shush her, but it
was no good. "I can't help it," she said.
     "Arlene, this is important. Put a sock in it."
"I can't help it," she insisted. "They look . . . they
look like Magilla Gorilla!"



     22

     Alone. Silence. He drifted.
     It was different than before; he had not been alone
before. Now there were no voices. The last words had
been a metallic voice complaining there was a slight
problem. Now there was nothing.
     Then there was sound. He heard her plainly. His
dead wife was paying him a visit. Rita. She was dead.
Sliced and diced by a steam demon back on Earth.
She couldn't be here.
     "Esteban," she whispered in the dark, as she used
to do when she woke up before him shortly before
dawn.
     "You're not here," he told her. It was the first time
he'd heard his own thoughts since he was cut off from
the others and placed in this true limbo.
     "You've summoned me."
"You're a dream," he replied morosely. "I don't
want to talk to you. I want to meet the aliens."
"But I'm the alien, Esteban. The only alien you've
ever really confronted."
     "No, I've fought aliens. Red devils. Shot the grin-
ning skulls and been ripped by their razor-sharp
teeth."
     "You felt my teeth first. Felt my lips."
"Go away. Leave me alone, you traitor. I must
return to my men. To my men and Sanders. They
need me. I must complete my mission among the
friendly aliens."
     Rita's voice was like a song he'd heard one too
many times. "I was your friend."
     "Never that. You were my wife."
She was sad. "You didn't try to be my friend. I
thought you didn't love me. So I didn't want to have
your alien growing inside me."
     Anger filled his mind, and he was nothing now
except his mind. Cold. Hot. The desire to hurt. To fire
a chain gun. To wield a chain saw. To fire a rocket that
would obliterate all memories of his marriage. The
steam demon hadn't been able to do that.
     "Please leave me alone," he pleaded. "I must
concentrate on the mission. Discipline. Responsibili-
ty. Command. Must return to the team. Save the
Earth. Destroy the enemy. Save . . . loved ones."
"Love," she repeated. "Part of love is forgiveness."
"You killed our--"
     "Love."
"You murdered the--"
     "Alien."
"You're--"
     "Dead!" She shouted the last word. "Like our alien,
I'm dead. You'll be dead too, if you don't open
yourself to new experiences. You must know what
you're fighting for. You can't just fight against, other-
wise the blue sphere shouldn't have bothered saving
you."
     Hidalgo heard himself say, "I was bleeding to
death. Why should I be saved and finish the journey
only to die at the moment of success?"
     He felt his tongue move in his mouth. He felt his
throat swallow. He had a body again. Now if he could
only find out what they had done with his eyes so he
could open them.
     "I'm sorry, Fly," I said, finally regaining control.
After encountering so many terrible faces, I was
shocked to see something so friendly and funny. I
stopped laughing. But the aliens still looked like
cartoon characters.
     To describe one was to describe the other. The
heads were large, like a gorilla's, with huge foreheads.
The eyes were wide-set. The nose was cute, like a little
peanut. Their hair was walnut-brown. They had a
kind of permanent five-o'clock shadow, like the cari-
catures of the first president of the United States to
have his name on a moon plaque: Richard M. Nixon.
Their complexion was a yellowish green; maybe they
had a little copper in their blood.
     Their bodies were massive and looked strong. The
arms were a bodybuilder's delight. They were longer
than a human's; I'd bet they were exactly the right
proportions for a gorilla. Then again, I might still be
trying to justify my reaction; the forearms bulged too
much for the simian comparison. They were exactly
like cartoons--I thought of Popeye the Sailor and
Alley Oop. I couldn't figure out how Fly had kept
from laughing!
     The big chest seemed even larger compared to the
narrow waist. I couldn't help noticing a detail that Fly
would probably miss: the tailoring of their clothes was
first-rate. They wore a sort of muted orange flight suit
with lots of vest pockets. Except for all the pockets,
the suits were surprisingly similar in design to
standard-issue combat suits, Homo sapiens model.
Some of the aliens didn't wear clothes at all, or if they
did, I couldn't tell. It was reassuring to find these
similarities to ourselves in our new-found friends.
They even had cute little combat boots so I couldn't
check on how far the gorilla comparison actually
went.
     There was no doubt about these guys being friends.
"Welcome to you," they said in unison. All that was
missing was a reference to the lollipop guild. There
was some serious English teaching going on here.
"Are you brothers?" Fly asked before I could.
"We are of the Klave," they said.
     "Can you speak individually?" I asked.
"Yes," they said in unison.
     I was good. I didn't laugh. While I was working to
keep a straight face, Fly took command of the situa-
tion. He stood up from the relaxichair, which seemed
to sigh as he departed, and touched one member of
the dynamic duo.
     "What's your name?" he asked.
"We are of the Klave."
     He repeated the procedure with the next one and
received the same answer. Then he followed up:
"That's your race? Your, uh, species?"
     Magilla number one looked at Magilla number two.
I think they were deciding which one would speak so
we wouldn't suffer through the stereo routine again.
One of them answered: "The Klave R Us."
     "How many?"
The other took his turn. "Going to a trillion less.
Coming from a hundred more."
     A general would like slightly better information. I
joined Fly. He was on one side of them so I took the
other, effectively bracketing them. Now we had a
mÊnage Á quatre.
     I touched the one nearer to me and asked, "Do you
have a name separate from the other?"
     "Separate?" he asked. Apparently there were some
problems with the English lessons.
     "This part of we?" asked mine. I nodded.
They put their heads together. They weren't doing
any sort of telepathy. These guys were whispering the
same sentence. Sounded like a tire going flat.
Then they looked up at the same time. Mine spoke
first: "After looking to your special English ..."
"Americanian," Fly's gorilla picked up the sen-
tence.
     "We are giving ourselves to a name," mine finished.
Then we stood there like four idiots waiting for
someone to say something. We'd succeeded in getting
them to speak separately, but now they played
sentence-completion games. What the hell, at least
they gave themselves a handle: "We are Sears and
Roebuck. We are your friend. We will take the battle
to all enemies, and together we fight the Freds."
Alone. Silence. She drifted down deserted streets.
In the late afternoon the temperature dropped
quickly. Jill put her windbreaker back on, but she was
still cold. She didn't like coffee, but she was glad to
have the hot cup in her hand; and she needed the
caffeine. Swirling the remains in the Styrofoam cup,
she looked thoughtfully at the light brown color that
came from two powdered creams. But it still tasted
bitter, just like coffee. At least she had managed to
find food in the abandoned grocery store.
     The sun was at a late afternoon slant, making
objects caught in the light stand out from their
surroundings. She was grateful she had sunglasses.
She was less grateful that she was lost. Something
had gone wrong with Ken's plan. He'd talked the
captain of the sub into meeting her, but only if she
arrived on schedule. She hadn't. The sub was long
gone by now. Captain Ellison couldn't be expected to
endanger his crew any longer than necessary.
Left to her own devices, as usual, Jill worked her
way back to L.A., where the first sight greeting her was
a zombie window washer. The thing saw her with its
watery eyes and began shambling in her direction,
brandishing a plastic bottle full of dirty water. Jill was
fresh out of ammo.
     She hated to run, especially from a zombie, the very
bottom of the monster food chain. But running was a
lot better than being groped by those rotting hands
with the jagged yellow fingernails. So she hauled ass.
A normal zombie might not run very fast. This one
didn't have the energy to do anything but curse. It
wasn't until Jill was three blocks away that she
wondered if maybe the creature really wasn't a zom-
bie. The thought that some homeless person had been
missed by both sides in the war made Jill's skin crawl.
Jeez, it was possible. The zombies might not notice
a bum, especially if he'd been sleeping in the right
garbage and had a sour odor on him. The big mon-
sters might assume he was a zombie, and any humans
coming through the area would think so too.
     The idea made her literally sick. She threw up and
covered herself in an odor like that of sour lemons,
which would be useful if she needed to pass for a
zombie herself. She looked bad enough. She hadn't
slept in days. The circles under her eyes and the
graveyard pallor of her skin gave her a living-dead
appearance.
     She didn't like the sick feeling in her gut. A drug-
store sign beckoned. She went in, hoping to find
something that would settle her stomach.
     Jill wasn't so exhausted that she forgot to take
precautions. She took out her piece even though it was
empty. Always a chance she could bluff her way out of
trouble if she encountered a human foe.
     The first tip-off was the clean floor. An abandoned
store would have been a disgusting mess, but this
place was spotless. Broken windows had been
     boarded up. She felt like kicking herself that she
hadn't picked up on so obvious a clue from outside.
Then she heard low voices. Unmistakably human.
Not broken bits and pieces of language repeated
without meaning. Whoever they were, they sure as
hell weren't zombies. For one thing, zombies didn't
listen to really bad classic alternative rock.
What sort of people were in enemy-occupied terri-
tory? They could only be guerrillas or traitors. She
examined her surroundings more closely. The origi-
nal contents of the store shelves were missing. She'd
made a bad choice as far as her stomach was con-
cerned.
     Large boxes stood in place of a drugstore's normal
stock. Shafts of light from the setting sun slid past the
boarded windows and illuminated the box next to her
knee. She looked inside and saw that it contained
bottles of a nutrient solution made from hydrogen
cyanide.
     She almost whistled but stopped herself. It would
be a good idea to find out if the voices belonged to
friend or foe. She had a sinking feeling they were the
enemy. This stuff could be used in the monster vats,
or in some stage of the creatures' development.
She'd find out while there was daylight. For all of
her adult accomplishments, Jill was little-girlish
enough to tiptoe without making a sound. On little
cat feet, she crept over to an air vent where she could
hear the voices much better.
     Two men were talking in the next room. She
couldn't see them, but she heard every word, loud and
clear.
     "The masters say we will inherit the Earth," said
the deeper voice.
     "They've already taken care of the meek," replied
the higher voice, snickering. He sounded like Peter
Lorre out of an old horror movie.
     Jill didn't need them to spell it out: these were
human traitors. The real McCoy. These dips hadn't
crawled out of any vat. She was shocked that these
human bad guys couldn't come up with a better name
for the Freds than "the masters." Really . . .
"I was at the general's briefing," said the deep
voice. "He told us the resistance is so desperate
they've started a propaganda campaign to convince
people that the masters have enemies elsewhere in the
universe."
     "Yeah, I heard that, too." The other one snickered.
"The masters are the only life besides us. They've told
us. Except for life they create, of course. That's why
we're so important to them; we're the only other
intelligent life in the galaxy."
     Jill had heard enough. Fly had often asked what she
would do if she got a crack at human traitors. She'd
wondered about that, too. Now she had her chance to
find out.
     Dr. Ackerman thought Jill was a genius. As young
as she was, she already knew there was a reality
beyond cyberspace, and that reality was just as impor-
tant when it wasn't virtual! She had many interests--
like chemistry, for instance.
     While Tweedledumb and Tweedledee continued
stroking each other, Jill checked the contents of the
other boxes. The enemy was using this drugstore as a
place to stockpile . . . everything Jill needed to make
cyanogen.
     The traitors were still chatting and playing their
lousy music, making enough noise to cover the
sounds of Jill's makeshift chemistry set. They didn't
even hear her setting up the portable battery-powered
fan next to the vent. She combined the ingredients
and started them cooking. Then she stood well back
from the deadly cyanide gas, covering her mouth with
a rag she'd found in the crate with the fan.
The last words she heard from the traitors came
from the deep voice before it wheezed, coughed, and
choked. "The masters say the Earth is the most
important place in the galaxy to them right now," he
said, "and we're in the center of the action."
As Jill left the drugstore, she looked up at the
darkening sky. "You're on your way to Phobos now.
After that you'll go so far away I'll probably never see
any of you again. I did those two creeps for you.
Good-bye, Albert, Arlene . . . Fly."



     23

     "Earth is not very important."
     "Come again?" asked Arlene.
Sears and Roebuck didn't pick up on her hurt tone.
They were simply answering my question with unfail-
ing honesty. I wondered if all the Klave were like this.
"They're not passing value judgments, Arlene," I
said. "If the facts offend our pride, it's not their
fault."
     If looks could kill, my best buddy would have fried
Fly on a stick. "Don't patronize me," she said--
which was the furthest thing from my mind. "I was
surprised, that's all. Why would the Freds produce a
ton of damned monsters and flood our solar system
with them if Earth is not important?"
     "Don't ask me, Arlene. Ask them."
We turned to Sears and Roebuck. They said noth-
ing. So Arlene carefully repeated her diatribe for
them. Boy, did they have an answer.
     "Earth is skirmish-zoned. They don't care go to
humans. Galaxy is setting for whole game. You'd call
galactic diplomacy by other means. No war goes to
Earth. Your space is too small. Earth is move in game.
All are having you here because you matter. All parts
matter to the Klave. Whole game matters to the . . ."
He used a word to denote the Freds. There was no
English equivalent, and a Klavian word slipped in. To
human ears, it was noise.
     "Is it only the Klave who fight the Freds?" asked
Arlene. Sears and Roebuck understood well enough
when we spoke of the enemy. For whatever alien
reason, they didn't call them Freds. I hoped I could
persuade them to start using all our words if only so I
wouldn't have to listen to a sound that put my teeth
on edge.
     In answering Arlene, they used another nails-on-
the-blackboard sound to describe the larger group of
aliens of which the Klave formed only a small part.
"All here are opposed to %$&*@@+."
     "Please," said Arlene, "could you call them Freds?
That's a word we can understand."
     "Freds," said our new pal.
"See, that didn't hurt." I thanked them.
     "Sears and Roebuck are real gentlemen," said Ar-
lene.
     S&R smiled. It was great finding aliens who could
smile even if it happened to be their version of a
frown (for all we could tell). We didn't ask. We didn't
want to mess with it. They were in there pitching.
They made another noble attempt in their peculiar
English to give us an education in galactic history.
I never dreamed there was so much going on behind
the attack on humanity. Suddenly the zombies, imps,
demons, ghosts, flying skulls, pumpkins, superpump-
kins, hell-princes, steam demons, spider-minds,
spider-babies, fatties, bonies, fire eaters, and weird-
ass sea monsters all seemed trivial in the grand
scheme being laid out for us. The monsters we fought
were bit players. And why not? Humanity was a bit
player in the galactic chess game being played out by
the Freds and the message aliens.
     And suddenly it was clear why we hadn't been
greeted by a brass band and presented with a key to
the city when we arrived. We were not big time. But it
was also evident why we had been invited. We were in
the bush leagues, but at least we were in the game.
Turned out it wasn't only the old mud ball that
didn't rate star treatment. There were a lot more
important bases than this one. I shook my head. I was
just a poor old Earth boy on his trip to the big burg.
This was the galactic base to me, even if it happened
to be in the boondocks.
     When I told Sears and Roebuck how I felt, they
looked at each other as if they were checking out a
reflection in a mirror. Then they said, "You will be
informed soon-time about location. You won't go to
boondocks, in your words."
     They returned to their main theme. Once again I
was impressed that the Klave seemed concerned
about all life victimized by the baddies. So it made
sense that we did rate special treatment from Sears
and Roebuck. They were the most noble aliens on this
whole colossal alien base, but they looked as if they'd
just stepped out of a kid's cartoon.
     A cartoon I had somehow missed when I was
growing up. Arlene was younger than I was, but she'd
seen a lot more popular entertainment. She asked me
why I was so culturally deprived. I knew how to shut
her up: "I was busy preparing mentally, physically,
and spiritually for my role as cosmic savior. I had no
time to waste time on frivolous media entertain-
ment." That showed her.
     I couldn't wait to find Albert and tell him the good
news. As soon as Captain Hidalgo was on his feet
again, he'd have to be briefed. Our mission was a
success, after all. We'd found aliens who didn't want
the Freds to occupy our solar system. It might not
mean any more to them than a village or town in one
of Earth's major wars, but we at least counted at that
level. We rated Third World treatment by superior
beings.
     The little voice in the back of my head suggested
that Director Williams would be more amused by this
discovery than either Admiral Kimmel or Colonel
Hooker would be. Hell, I'd like to see the faces of the
human sellouts if they heard where they rated in the
cosmic scheme of things.
     Then that old mind reader Arlene asked S&R the
googolplex-dollar question: "So what are you guys
fighting about?"
     An hour later, by Earth standard time, we still
hadn't grasped what S&R were trying to get across.
Their odd syntax wasn't the problem. We weren't
picking up on the concepts.
     We finally received assistance from an unexpected
quarter: Albert joined us; he came swimming through
the air. Not really, of course. It only looked that way.
The base had gravity zones and free-fall areas. What-
ever the Freds could do on Phobos, the message aliens
could do better! Albert was simply taking the escala-
tor. He had drifted up near the ceiling of our section.
Then he slowly drifted down on a transition-to-
gravity escalator! That's what it was. He moved his
arms and legs as if he were doing the breast stroke,
grinning at us the whole time.
     I hoped he was over his sulk or pout or whatever it
was. I didn't buy the meditation bit. He seemed eager
to rejoin his buds. And he'd picked a good moment to
meet Sears and Roebuck.
     The moment Albert touched down, he took out a
little purple ball and squeezed it. A duplicate of
Albert appeared. I'd seen those toys before. We
thought we had virtual reality on the old mud ball.
The doppelganger matched Albert's movements per-
fectly.
     "What's this about?" I asked.
"Trust me," he said. "I'll tell you later." For the rest
of the time he was with us, his three-dimensional
image aped his movements a few feet away.
     Arlene shrugged. So what if Albert was playing
games to deal with his boredom? She made the
introductions: "Sears and Roebuck, I'd like you to
meet another member of our team."
     The Magilla Gorilla faces grinned more widely than
I thought possible. Looked as if their heads were in
danger of splitting open. "We encountered these unit
in times going before," they said.
     Well, I'd be dipped in a substance they recycled
very effectively here at the alien base. I may have
judged Albert's meditations too harshly. He waved at
S&R, and both of them waved back.
     "We're discoursing the wordage but not reaching
home plate," said S&R.
     Albert helped himself to a glass of water from our
table. "You must have asked them for background,"
he said.
     Arlene playfully pulled at Albert's sleeve. He
seemed very comfortable in the shimmering robes
he'd selected. The designs looked slightly oriental to
me. "Have you talked to them before?"
     "Yes."
"Do you understand what the war is about?" she
asked.
     Albert sat in one of the chairs we'd vacated. "Near
as I can make out, they're having a religious war."
S&R had mentioned diplomacy. It would have been
nice if that word had registered on Arlene. She
snorted when Albert said the r-word. "I'd expect that
from you," she said with disdain.
     "Arlene!" I jumped in.
"It's all right, Fly," Albert jumped right back. "I
can understand why Arlene would react that way."
"Excuse me," she interjected, but despite the words
she didn't sound polite. "Please don't talk about me
in the third person when I'm right here."
     Albert wasn't in a mood to back off. "We've been
doing that with Sears and Roebuck, and they're right
here."
     The man had a point. S&R politely waited for one
of us to address them directly. Otherwise, they didn't
budge and didn't make a peep.
     Albert regarded Arlene with a strong, steady gaze
I'd never noticed from him before. I definitely needed
to rethink my views on meditation.
     "Arlene," he began softly, "it might not be possible
for us to understand why these advanced beings are in
conflict. They have such advanced technology and
powers that they can't possibly need territory or each
other's resources. The war is some sort of galactic
chess game. It may not be possible for us to grasp the
root reasons for the war. I think the best we can hope
is to make a good analogy. With my beliefs, the best I
can do is compare the situation to two different
branches of the Southern Baptists, or, say, the Sunni
Muslims and Shiite Muslims. From the inside, there
is a huge chasm. From the outside, the distinctions
may seem insignificant. If you find my analysis unac-
ceptable, we will say nothing more about it, but I
would like basic courtesy, if possible."
     For the first time in their relationship, Albert gave it
to my best buddy good and hard. At least, it was the
first time I ever noticed. Albert allowed himself to use
a patronizing tone. I thought Arlene had it coming.
Apparently so did she. "I'm sorry, Albert," she
said. "Your explanation helps. You know how impa-
tient I am, but that's no excuse to be rude."
"Thank you," he said.
     This seemed like a good time to pick up the ball and
run with it. "Sears and Roebuck," I addressed them.
"Yes?" they replied.
     "Did any of the conversation we just had help, uh,
clarify the problem? Unless you weren't listening, that
is. We weren't trying to have a private conversation
right in front of you."
     "Private?"
"Well, you know what I mean. Private! I mean, you
have such a large English vocabulary . . . however
you picked it up."
     "Free-basing," they said. We all did a big collective
"Huh?" So they tried again: "Data-basing. We draw
on large dictionary stores. Private is the lowest rank in
the Earth army."
     "Yes, well," I floundered around. "We'll return to
that subject at a later time." I stared at their comic
faces. They stared right back. "I've forgotten what I
asked you," I admitted.
     "Religion unclear going to object-subject," said
Sears and Roebuck. "We are sorry we fail the expora-
tion."
     "Explanation," I corrected them without thinking
about it. Jesus, I was becoming used to their sen-
tences. "I don't mean to criticize you," I continued,
"but we're not getting anywhere. Thanks for trying to
explain."
     "Criticize," said S&R. "Movie critics. Book critics.
Art critics. Science-fiction reviewers ..."
     Albert saw the direction before I did. "Is that it?"
he asked, eagerly. "Do you have aesthetic differences
with the Freds?"
     "War going on to hundreds of thousands of years,"
said S&R. "Go to planetary systems change. Different
races are subjects, objects."
     "How did it begin?" asked Arlene, suddenly as
enthusiastic as Albert.
     "You call them books," said S&R. "The Holy
Tests."
     "Texts," I did it again, almost unconsciously.
"Texts," they said. I felt like giving them an A-plus.
"Books are twelve million years old. The Freds disa-
gree with us."
     "With the Klave?" I asked.
"All of us. Not only Klave-us, but all that are here
us. We bring you for going to the war."
     "Literary criticism," marveled Arlene. I wasn't
about to forget that she'd been an English major for a
while.
     Albert clapped like a little kid who'd just been given
the present he always wanted--understanding. "The
two sides are literary critics, conquering stellar sys-
tems to promote their own school of criticism. I love
it. It's too insane not to love. What is their primary
disagreement over the twelve-million-year-old
books?"
     S&R gave us one of their best sentences: "The Freds
want to take the books apart."
     Arlene screamed, but it was a happy kind of
scream. "Oh, my God," she said, "they're deconstruc-
tionists!"



     24

     "You'll have to fill me in on what that
means," Fly whispered in my ear.
     I was still reeling from the implications of what I'd
blurted out. I looked at Fly with the blankest stare in
my repertoire. "You mean deconstructionism?" I
asked.
     "Yeah."
I wasn't about to admit to the great Fly Taggart that
I had very little idea. I didn't complete my college
work. I was afraid that if I started collecting degrees
in the liberal arts it would handicap me for life in the
real world. But I'd picked up a few buzzwords. Time
to bluff my way through.
     "Deconstructionism is what it sounds like," I said.
"Professors of literature take apart texts and examine
them."
     "How's that different from what other professors
do?" Fly wanted to know. He was so prejudiced
against the typical product of our institutions of
higher learning that I wondered why he was pumping
me at all. I'd become the official exception to his
belief that college damaged the mind.
     One more comment and I'd exhaust my store of
information on the subject: "Well, they come up with
different meanings than the authors intended." I'd
shot my bolt. Before Fly could ask for elaboration and
examples, I threw myself on the mercy of the aliens.
"I'm sure Sears and Roebuck can take it from there,"
I said, "with all the information about our world
they're carrying in their handsome heads."
     "Nice try," said Albert as he endeavored to keep a
straight face. I wouldn't put it past him to know
plenty about the subject, but I'll bet he was still sore
about my sarcasm earlier. Dumb Arlene! Dumb.
Besides, what we really needed to know was what was
in those old books, if we could understand them at all.
Sears and Roebuck did not rescue me. Their heads
were full of information about our language, but they
had a talent for confusion at the most inappropriate
times. Like now.
     "Deconstruction," they said, "is the article 'de'
preceding the noun, 'construction,' as in deconstruc-
tion of a house."
     Great. They were doing a Chico Marx routine! Fly
and Albert both lost it about then and broke out
laughing. Well, if they could laugh at Magilla Gorillas,
so could I. Our alien buds didn't join in, but I don't
think they were offended. They didn't understand our
humor. Not surprising, really. Humor is the last part
of a culture to be internalized by an outsider, if even
then. If there was such a phenomenon as Klave
humor, we were just as unlikely to pick up on it.
Albert came to the rescue. I wondered how much
time he'd spent with S&R while I thought he was off
brooding. He made it simple: "We're talking about a
literary theory. The Freds have one. Your side has
another. If you look up deconstructionism in a histo-
ry of literature you will probably find an opposing
theory that might describe your side in this galactic
war."
     With a little nudge in the right direction, S&R
could work wonders. "Justice a minute," they said.
"We learn with going to photogenic memory. Decon-
struction is not what we said. We understand the
differential."
     It was my turn to whisper in Albert's ear. I wanted
to be friendly with the big lug and make sure I was
forgiven. "I can't decide if Sears and Roebuck are
harder to understand when they think they under-
stand us."
     "Amen," he said. I was at least half forgiven.
"We know what the Klave are being in the war,"
said S&R.
     The suspense was killing me, even if Fly's eyes were
beginning to get that special bored look right before
he started rocking and rolling.
     "You are what?" I prompted S&R.
"We are hyperrealists," they said. "We leave books
together."
     "And you leave worlds alone," Albert finished,
pleased at the direction our conversation had taken.
S&R were on a roll. "When your unit is restored, we
go to Fred invasion base and continue your part in the
war. We will fighting with you."
     It took a moment for me to realize what they were
talking about. Our unit included Captain Hidalgo. I'd
never thought we'd travel these incredible distances
only to pick up two new members for our fire team. I
wondered how Hidalgo would deal with this develop-
ment.
     "How far away is this base?" asked Albert.
I almost chided Albert but caught myself. How
could we ask the distance to the Freds when we didn't
know where the hell we were? I couldn't understand
the reluctance of the aliens to give us the straight of it.
Could Albert be trying to trick S&R into revealing our
location?
     Whether intended or not, that was the result. "The
Fred base is two hundred bright-years away," they
said.
     "Light-years," Fly corrected them. If he kept this
up, he might have a great career ahead of him ... as
an editor!
     I figured it was my turn. "That doesn't tell us how
far the Freds are from our solar system."
     S&R answered immediately: "Two hundred light-
years."
     While I marveled at another passable reply from
our hosts, Fly picked up on the content. "Excuse me,"
he said in his I-really-can't-take-any-more-surprises
voice. "What did you just say?"
     S&R said, "Two hundred light-years."
"That's the distance from this base?" Fly asked.
S&R nodded. They'd at least picked up one of our
human traits. "The distance from our solar system?"
he nailed the coffin shut. They nodded again.
Fly sounded so calm and reasonable that I feared
for all of our lives. This was worse than when he
found out about the month and a half of travel time
on the Bova.
     "Just so I'm absolutely clear," he said, "regarding
the location of this galactic base, we are located
exactly where?"
     If Sears and Roebuck had seemed like cartoon
characters before, the impression was even more
pronounced now. There was one word they had
     apparently missed in their extensive study of the
English language: "oops."
     S&R didn't hold back any longer: "We are past the
orbit of Pluto-Charon."
     "Why didn't you tell us this before?" I asked.
"Need to know," they said. "Hidalgo part of your
unit will be returned to you soon, and unit completes
all."
     "It was getting about time to tell us anyway,"
Albert translated helpfully.
     "Let me get this straight," said Fly, oblivious to all
other subjects until he was satisfied on this one.
"We've been convinced of the relative unimportance
of the Earth in the big scheme of things. So it comes as
a shock to learn you have this space museum parked
just outside our insignificant solar system."
I thought Fly was laying it on a bit thick. I would
have told him to take a stress pill and calm down ...
if we'd had any stress pills. S&R didn't seem clued in
to human frustration.
     When Fly calmed down, S&R attempted to explain.
One thing I'll say for my pal, when he finds out he's
been off the wall on something, he takes his medicine
like a trooper. Hell, like a marine.
     Naturally, we all believed we'd traveled many light-
years to get to this base. Nope. Wrong about that. We
thought it a strong possibility that we'd been in transit
for many years, Earth standard time. Nope. Wrong
again. Several other assumptions were shot down in
flames as well. I remembered the director saying there
was no way to pinpoint the location of the secret base,
and I recall Jill teasing him about that. How desper-
ately Warren Williams wanted to unlock the secrets of
the stars.
     The poor man would probably be as disappointed
as Fly to learn that there is no such thing as faster-
than-light travel. Many people have never imagined
otherwise, but most of them would not imagine a
galactic war with a myriad of alien races either. Up to
this moment on the gigantic galactic base--which
happened to be parked in our own backyard--I
would have thought a galactic war must prove the
existence of FTL.
     I'd grown up reading all of the great SF writers.
E. E. Doc Smith and his inertialess drive. John W.
Campbell Jr. and a dozen clever ways to get around
Einstein's speed limit. Arthur C. Clarke with a bag of
tricks the others had missed. The discovery of a
galactic war without faster-than-light travel blew my
mind more completely than the spider-mind carcass
Fly and I had plastered all over Deimos.
     S&R finally succeeded in explaining the reality to
us. Fly wasn't even all that much of a science-fiction
fan, and he took the news really hard. It must have
been all those Star Trek shows that not even he could
have missed seeing. Or maybe it was just his romantic
sense of adventure. We felt as if we'd traveled across
the universe, and then we find out we're next door to
the old neighborhood. Albert didn't seem bothered at
all. There are no articles of faith about FTL outside of
science-fiction conventions.
     It was hard work extracting facts from S&R, but
they were ready and willing if we were. Reality was
like this: first of all, there is no such thing as hyper-
space. Hyper kids like Jill, yes. Space, no. Everything
happens at relativistic velocities. When we went
through the Gate on Phobos, the trip took us almost
seven and a half hours by Earth standard time,
traveling just under light-speed as beams of coherent,
self-focusing information.
     The galactic chess game stretched out over millen-
nia. We hadn't asked yet, but I was ready to bet the
farm that some of these suckers lived a freakin' long
time. It almost had to be that way. Otherwise how
could individuals maintain interest in their blood-
drenched games?
     It had taken the Freds more than two hundred of
our years to reach Earth in the beginning! This was
my idea of long-range planning. This was my idea of
an implacable foe.
     These guys got off by critiquing twelve-million-
year-old books and fighting over which important
commentator correctly interpreted them! Jeez, I won-
dered how many alien races had been exterminated
because of a bad review? At times the struggle had
erupted into full-scale warfare. It didn't make Fly,
Albert, or me feel any better to learn that now was a
relatively calm period with only occasional brush
wars along the borders.
     Millions of rotting human corpses were almost
overlooked. The monsters sent by the Freds to either
end or enslave mankind were just one more move in
the lit-crit game. As we painfully pieced together the
story of life in the galaxy, I had the weird feeling that
the Freds took the human race more seriously than
any of the "good guys." Oh, we'd connected with
S&R. Maybe the entire Klave operated at their high
level of ethics and decency. But even so, the best we
could expect from our allies was a chance to be
marines again.
     The Freds had sent hundreds, thousands, maybe
millions of their demonic monsters to clean humani-
ty's clock. Simple human pride made me feel for the
first--and I hoped the last--time that the Freds were
a worthy foe. They must be scared of us. The decon-
structionists thought we might deconstruct them. The
hyperrealists were busy with their own shit.



     25

     "I love you."
Arlene touched my face and said, "You didn't have
to do this."
     I thought I'd never get her alone. Then Fly obliged
me by wandering off with Sears and Roebuck. They
were still trying to explain to him why we exist in a
sub-light Einsteinian universe. Arlene was too de-
pressed to want to hear the details just now.
Besides, I could turn off my Albert-projector right
now. It was disconcerting to watch myself. I wasn't all
that vain, and I didn't want to watch myself all the
time. Of course, I'd had a very good reason for
bringing the device. I'd spent time with S&R first and
picked up a lot about their peculiarities. I could tell
Arlene and Fly about that later. Shop talk. Business.
The mission.
     Meanwhile, something more important concerned
me: my opportunity to be alone with Arlene! Our
little spat was forgotten as she held up her gold ring. I
think I saw the hint of a tear in a corner of her eye.
The ring was attached to a necklace.
     "How did you manage this?" she asked. The origi-
nal ring had vanished along with everything else when
we went through the Gate.
     "Sears and Roebuck," I said. "We couldn't ask for
better guardian angels."
     She nodded in acknowledgment. "How much time
did you spend with them before Fly and I met them?"
"Enough."
     She chuckled. "You don't like giving away the
details of your surprise."
     "You can figure it out. Sears and Roebuck have
more tricks up their sleeves than only synthesizing
food for us. They synthesized the ring when I asked. I
only had to give them the details. I didn't ask for a
new set of dog tags."
     "I'll live. Tell me, did you make any attempt to
distinguish Sears from Roebuck?"
     "Didn't seem worth the trouble."
"I know what you mean. Did you ask them to keep
the ring a secret until you could surprise me?"
"No. Once they made the ring, they gave it to me.
Now it was my business. Besides, I'm not sure they'd
be very good at keeping secrets. They don't seem to
have a privacy concept."
     "I was wondering about that. I don't think they
understand our concept of individuality, either. The
Klave sounds like a collectivist society."
     "Or more than that," I added.
"Yeah. I wonder how far the collectivism goes. It
would be interesting to find out."
     She stopped, waiting for me to say something. I
merely regarded her and listened to my heart beat.
Then I deliberately looked away. We were standing
close together over by the rail next to the floating
table. Overhead an aquarium drifted, the sea crea-
tures within swimming lazily. My soul felt a great
peace. I was finally witnessing strange things from
other worlds, and I didn't have to destroy anything. I
didn't have to take out the trash. I didn't need to fire a
rocket overhead and spill fish guts all over my lady
love.
     I was tired of shop talk. I waited for Arlene to bring
the subject back to us. The ring did it. Her eyes went
from mine down to the gold circle in her hand and
then back up again.
     "This means the world to me," she said. "The
universe." She said it as if she meant it.
     I wished she had long hair instead of a high-and-
tight. Hawaii Base had a barber, dammit! With long
hair, a strand would occasionally fall into her eye and
I could brush it out. She brought out my fatherly side.
I wouldn't violate my beliefs for her, but that didn't
make me sexually repressed. Whenever appropriate, I
intended to remind her of my proposal.
     She didn't make it easy. Fly kept saying she was the
bravest man he knew. The comparisons to a man were
most appropriate. She had the morality of a typical
modern man. My problem. Her problem.
     "Albert," she said huskily, "have you reconsidered
my offer?"
     "Arlene, have you reconsidered my proposal?"
She started to respond but left her mouth open in
mid-response. She looked cute that way. Then she got
the words out: "You used the p-word."
     "Sure did."
"Who would marry us?"
     "Captain Hidalgo is the captain of our 'ship.' The
medbot says he's recovering."
     "I can just imagine how he'd react if we asked him
to tie the knot."
     I disagreed. "The captain has grown a lot on this
mission. He's a better man. His horizons have ex-
panded."
     "Be hard not to change out here," she joked. I
didn't laugh. There were times to be serious and this
was one of them. "Arlene, will you marry me?"
I could tell she was disappointed in me. We were
playing a game where I wasn't supposed to be so
direct. It was okay for her to suggest any number of
lewd acts, and that was acceptable. There was one
rule, actually: I wasn't supposed to use the p-word.
She wasn't Fly's tough guy this time, not when she
used my least favorite line of modern women: "It
wouldn't be fair to you." I don't think there has been
a woman since time began who believed that particu-
lar sentiment.
     "I don't believe in fair. I believe in promises. You're
a woman of your word. You honor your commit-
ments. We both know that. You're afraid to make a
commitment you doubt you can keep."
     "Then why do you keep asking me?"
I shrugged. "We belong together. I feel it in my
bones."
     She sighed. "We can't plan for the future."
I took her by the hand, and she made a fist over the
ring. "Arlene, marriage isn't about planning for the
future. It's a promise that can last five minutes or fifty
years. Be honest. You're not afraid we won't have
enough time together. You're afraid we'll have too
much."
     She pulled away so quickly the necklace dangling
from her fist got caught on my thumb. It looked as if
we were attached by an umbilical cord . . . and then
we were separated.
     She sounded like a little girl when she said, "I love
you, Albert, but don't ever tell me how I feel. Or what
I'm afraid of."
     We'd faced the worst demons together. We'd
sprayed death and destruction among the uglies from
the deep beyond. But the gulf between us was deeper
and darker and scarier than a steam demon's rear
end.
     This time we were rescued by Sarge--good old
Flynn Taggart. He was back from his latest S&R
session.
     He was cheerful, at least. "If this keeps up, I'm
trying out for a new career as translator to the stars.
Captain Hidalgo will be with us in time for dinner.
Sears and Roebuck have laid out the plan to me."
"Shouldn't they have waited until dinnertime for
our briefing?" I asked.
     He shook his head. "Not these guys, Albert. They
figure what they say to one of us goes for all. I don't
believe there are any ranks among the Klave."
We waited for Arlene to say something. We'd gotten
in the habit. I must have upset her more than I
realized. She didn't contribute. So I asked, "Do you
think the captain will want us to be good marines
when he's restored to us?"
     I didn't mean to sound sarcastic. I had nothing
against the captain. Arlene could vouch for that . . .
when she wasn't pissed with me. But Fly took it as
sarcasm.
     "His call, mister! The captain is in command."
"Yes," Arlene finally spoke up. "Hidalgo is respon-
sible for accomplishing the mission. We must do our
best to support him."
     Fly and she exchanged looks. There was a bond
between them that nothing could ever weaken, includ-
ing marriage.
     "What did you learn from Sears and Roebuck?" she
asked.
     Fly told us.
We would accompany S&R on a little junket to the
Fred base. The mission objective was some kind of
super science weapon capable of initiating a resonant
feedback that would wipe out all the computer sys-
tems of the bad guys.
     Sounded good to me, but there was a hitch. The
enemy base was twenty light-years away, and it had
been hammered into all of us that Star Trek was
wishful thinking. There were only slow boats to
China.
     The journey would take twenty years! Then it
would take another twenty years for the feedback
virus to be transmitted to all the Fred computers. The
virus could only be installed on the system at the
base. I wished we had Jill with us.
     I had earned passing grades in school. I'd made
change when I worked a cash register for my first real
job. I could add numbers. Forty years!
     "We'll spend the rest of our lives on this mission," I
blurted out.
     "No," said Fly cheerfully. "That's what I thought,
too. It's not going to be that bad. We may not have
FTL, but we do have access to ships that travel fast
enough for our purposes. The trip will only be a few
weeks of subjective time, even though it will count as
forty Earth-years."
     "What will Jill look like by the time we get back?"
wondered Arlene.
     We took a moment to mull that one over. Then Fly
resumed his presentation on how to save the universe
in one simple lesson. The plan sounded a lot more
feasible than some of the other things we'd done.
We would leave the ship in orbit around a moon
outside the Fred detection zone. On that moon was an
experimental teleportation device based on Gate
technology. We could use the experimental
     teleporter--theoretically, and by the grace of God--
to reach the Fred base without the need of a receiver
pad on the other end. As we'd discovered on Phobos,
teleporters let you keep your gear. The plan ought to
work.
     As it turned out, the message aliens, the hyperreal-
ists, had first discovered the Gates some three hun-
dred thousand years ago and had been doing improve-
ments ever since. Yes, discovered. No one knew who
originally invented the Gates. The estimates for the
oldest ones were the kind of numbers that give me a
headache. There was an astronomer on TV who used
to talk about "billions and billions" of years.
So what if this mode of travel had a few bugs in it?
So did the American transportation system--the best
the Earth had ever known.
     I threw out a question: "Did you find out how the
Freds took our guys by surprise? That's been trou-
bling me ever since Sears and Roebuck started giving
out with the history lessons."
     Fly picked up a red ball from his unfinished meal
off the floating table. I couldn't stand the taste of
those things and hoped they'd come up with some-
thing better real soon now.
     All of a sudden he had a devilish expression. "I
wonder if I could throw this all the way up to the zero-
g zone you used to coast in, Albert."
     "Probably, but it wouldn't be polite."
Arlene agreed with me. "Don't do that, Fly."
"Well, they must have a remarkable garbage-
     disposal system," he said, "but I haven't see it work
yet."
     "Let's not find out it consists of enslaved marines,"
Arlene suggested wisely. I was glad to see her sense of
humor returning.
     "Point made," he said, popping the sphere into his
mouth, and making a face before he swallowed. "I
should've pitched it. Let me answer Albert. These
aliens have a very interesting idea of a surprise attack.
I wouldn't want to hire any of them as taxi drivers.
Takes too long to get a cab now. They take forever to
change anything! Once they achieved civilization it
took millions of years for them to make the same
amount of progress we did in--I don't know--say,
ten thousand years?"
     Arlene whistled. "Slow learners."
"Yeah," Fly continued. "Which is one reason the
Fred attack took them by surprise. Sears and Roebuck
say the attack came a lot sooner than expected--only
thirty thousand years after the good guys established
their observation base."
     "Just like yesterday," I threw in. "So tell me, Fly,
do you know what sort of opposition we may expect
on our new mission?"
     "Yes, Albert. After describing to Sears and Roebuck
some of our adventures, like how we took down the
spider-mind on the train, they said one thing."
"We're all ears," hinted Arlene, doing herself an
injustice.
     "They said, 'You ain't seen nothing yet!'"



     26

     I opened my eyes to a terrifying sight. A
pulsing pole loomed over me, its mad eye blinking.
There was a whirring sound, and I tasted copper in
my mouth. And then something darted on the edge of
my peripheral vision. It seemed to be circling, waiting
to pounce.
     Then the pole-thing moved out of the way so the
flying thing could attack! I tried to move, but my
limbs were immobile. I tried to shout for help but my
throat was frozen. Right before the airborne object
smashed into my face, I saw ... a face on a blue ball.
A friendly face. A blue sphere. It was another of the
blue spheres that had saved my life before. Now it was
happening again. If this kept up, I'd think about
taking some vitamins. I wasn't used to being an
invalid.
     The blue engulfed me, and I felt like a million bucks
again. Then I could move all I wanted. I sat up and
saw Corporal Arlene Sanders.
     "Welcome back," she said.
"Do you mind if I put on some clothes?"
     "No, sir," she said. Was that a smile pulling at the
corners of her mouth? I was definitely alive.
The team looked one hundred percent. Whatever
Taggart, Sanders, and Gallatin had been doing while I
was laid up must have been good for them. They had
so many things to tell me that formality would simply
have gotten in the way. We were so far outside normal
mission parameters that I realized the old adage of
Gordon Dickson fully applied: "Adapt or die." The
challenge was simply to keep Fly, Arlene, and Albert
from interrupting each other as they took turns filling
me in on the state of the mission as we ate our chow.
Mother of Mary! What had we gotten ourselves
into? I wondered how many incredible things I was
supposed to swallow along with the red things that
tasted like very old tomatoes preserved in vinegar. Fly
assured me they'd promised new and improved food
soon. Arlene and Albert seconded the motion. If a
sergeant and two corporals believed that strongly in
something, I was going to eat all the little red things I
could right now.
     Seriously, I was pleased and impressed by what
they had done while I was subject to the tender
ministrations of what Arlene called the medical ro-
bot. Waking up to see something like that was not an
experience to recommend.
     No sooner had I gotten used to the medbot than
along came Sears and Roebuck. I was glad they were
on our side. I wouldn't want to blow away anything
that looked the way they did.
     "We are glad your unit is complete," they told us.
I'd never had more unusual dinner companions. They
ate little pyramids made out of some gelatinous
substance. The pyramids were the exact same color
blue as the spheres that kept saving my life.
Arlene warned me not to eat any food that wasn't
human-approved. She needn't have worried. Being
fire team leader didn't mean I had to commit suicide.
I wanted to hang around for the mission with our new
alien allies.
     The medbot wouldn't leave my side until it was
convinced my recovery was complete. While we
munched, it volunteered some information. "For
samples of Homo sapiens, all of you are recom-
mended for upcoming missions of a military nature."
"We should hope so," I said.
     "You are dopamine types."
"Huh?"
     "It is a neurotransmitter strongly linked to seeking
out adventure. You have many exon repetitions of the
dopamine receptor gene. The genetic link to the D4
receptor. . . ."
     "Wait a minute," interjected Albert. "Are you
saying we are chemically programmed to want to kick
demonic butt?"
     "Yes," said the medbot.
Arlene clapped her hands. "This isn't one of those
pussy robots that says things like 'It does not com-
pute.' This one's got English down."
     "And without even going to college," sneered Fly.
"That's a cheap shot," Arlene threw back.
     "Why do you do that?" asked the medbot.
"Do what?" asked Arlene.
     "Call me a robot. I'm not a toaster. I'm not a VCR.
I'm not a ship's guidance computer."
     Arlene raised an eyebrow and asked, "What are
you, then?"
     "Organic tissues. Carbon-based life, the same as
you."
     "What's your name?" I asked the barber pole. Its
answer did not translate into English. I tried my hand
at diplomacy. "Would you mind if we continued
calling you, uh, medbot?"
     "No. That's a fine name. Please don't call me a
robot."
     Sears and Roebuck got us back on track. "Your unit
and our unit are ready soon go to war." Their English
might need work, but the meaning was clear. We
shouldn't quarrel among ourselves, even if we were
the type to seek out thrills and variety.
     Sears and Roebuck looked at each other. They sure
as hell appeared to be one character looking himself
over in the mirror. They reached some kind of a
decision and left the table, saying, "We are going to
elsewhere. We are returning to here."
     While they were absent, an alien who could have
passed for a dolphin on roller skates with one arm
snaking out of its head scooted over with another
course of the dinner. This stuff looked almost like
Earth food. It could have been enchiladas.
     "Who is going to try this first?" I asked.
"Rank has its privileges," said Fly, the wise guy.
A Mexican standoff. Arlene played hero and took
the first bite. I wish we'd had a camera to take her
picture. "That's horrible," she said, doing things with
her face that could have made her pass for one of the
aliens.
     "I'll try it," said Albert, proving there really was
love between these two. It's not like they could keep it
a secret. He proved himself a credit to his faith. His
face didn't change at all, but the words sounded as if
they were being pushed through a very fine strainer:
"That is awful, but familiar somehow."
     "Yes," Arlene agreed. "I can almost place it."
"This is not what I had in mind," Fly complained
before he even tried it. "The mess was supposed to
improve."
     "It is a mess," agreed Arlene.
While Fly worked up his nerve, I tried the food. It
sure as hell didn't taste like an enchilada, but I
recognized the flavor right away. "Caramba! No won-
der you recognize the flavor. It's choline chloride."
The worst-tasting stuff this side of hell.
     "Oh, no," said Fly, who had passed up eating the
red balls while he waited for the "good stuff."
We'd all had to take choline chloride as a nutrition-
al supplement. It was part of light drop training. The
others remembered it from then. I was still using it, or
had been right up to departure. The stuff was used by
bodybuilders; it was as good for muscle tone as it was
bad for the taste buds.
     "I wonder what's for dessert," Fly said hopefully.
Sears and Roebuck returned with the final course. But
it wasn't something to eat.
     "We have bringing you space suits for your unit,"
they said.
     "Why have you brought us suits?" I asked, unable
to recognize anything like space gear. They were
carrying one thin box that would've been perfect for
delivering a king-size pizza with everything on it.
"So you are going to your new spaceship," they
announced. I wondered what I'd think of an alien
craft. I already missed that old tub, the Bova.
"Where are the suits?" asked Arlene.
     One of them opened the box. The other pulled out
what appeared to be large sheets of Saran Wrap. And
all I could think was: I should've stayed in bed.
I never thought I'd say this about an officer, but I
was glad Hidalgo was with us again. He'd started out
a typical martinet butthead. Now he insisted on being
a human being. I guess if you drop an officer into a
world of aliens and weird creatures, he has no choice
but to turn human. The base must have been affecting
me as well: Fly Taggart, the officer's pal!
     Ever since we'd traveled over the rainbow I'd
stopped worrying about Arlene's attitude toward Hi-
dalgo. I'd worried what I would do if the guy turned
out to be another Weems. Despite my complaining, I
didn't think I could just stand by and let Arlene space
a fellow marine. Didn't seem right somehow, even to
an officer. I wasn't sure the end of civilization as we
knew it meant open season on fragging officers. Any-
way, it was ancient history now. We were a team in
every sense of the word.
     When S&R presented us with the high-tech space
suits, it was a test for Hidalgo's command abilities.
He'd been laid up for most of the tour of wonders, but
he knew we weren't crazy when we briefed him.
All of us had a moment of thinking S&R were
     playing a joke on us. Hidalgo was in command. He
had to decide that we were going all the way with our
alien buds. We'd moved into a realm where ignorance
could be fatal. The captain made the decision that
counted, the same one we'd reached in our hearts and
minds. Albert had the right word: "faith." We put our
faith in the twin Magilla Gorillas.
     Of course, we could rationalize anything. It wasn't
until we were outside the base that I really believed
the suits worked. We zipped up the damned things
like sandwich bags that I prayed wouldn't turn into
body bags.
     Inside the airlock, we felt ridiculous. The transpar-
ent material draped around us like bad Halloween
costumes. Only two parts of the suit were distinguish-
able from the Saran Wrap. The helmet was like a
hood, hanging off the whole body of the material. The
belt was like a solid piece of plastic. And that was it!
"Where's the air supply?" asked Arlene. S&R said
it was in the belt.
     "Where are the retros for getting around?" I asked.
Same answer.
     "How about communicators?" Hidalgo wanted to
know. Ditto. And ditto.
     Only one question merited a different response.
"How tough is this material?" asked Albert.
     "Can be damaged," said S&R. Nothing wrong with
that sentence. Just the chilling reminder that however
advanced these suits were, they didn't eliminate risk