Contravening the authority of the Amicus, he had unleashed the full firepower of the dreadnought.

Globar and Schall burned like Sodom and Gomorrah.

But unlike those G.o.d-condemned h.e.l.lholes of an ancient religion, no one knew if the residents of Globar and Schall were good, or evil, or merely frightened natives of a world caught in the middle of an interstellar war that seemed destined never to end.

"All I know," Drabix had said, by way of justification, "is that planet's atmospheric conditions are perfect for the formation of the crystalline form of the power-mineral we need. If we don't get it, Kyba will. It's too rare, and it's too important to vacillate. I'm sorry about this, but it has to be done." So he had done it.

She had argued that they didn't even know for certain if the mineral was there, in the enormous quant.i.ties Drabix believed were present. It was true the conditions were right for its formation and on similar worlds where the conditions were approximated they had found the precious crystals in small amounts...but how could even such a near-certainty justify destruction so total, so inhuman?

Drabix had chosen not to argue. He had made his choice, knowing it would end his career in the Service; but he was a patriot; and allegiance overrode all other considerations.

Ferraro despised him. It was the only word that fit. She despised everything about him, but this blind servitude to cause was the most loathsome aspect of his character.

And even that was futile, as Globar and Schall burned. Who would speak the elegy for the thousands, perhaps millions, who now burned among the stones of the twin cities?When the conflagration died down, and the rubble cooled, the Descartes sent down its reconnaissance ships; and after a time, Commander Drabix and Friend Ferraro went to the surface. To murmur among the ashes.

Command post had been set up on the island the natives called Stand of Light because of the manner in which the sunlight from Epsilon Indi was reflected back from the sleek boles of the gigantic trees that formed a central cl.u.s.ter forest in the middle of the twenty-five kilometer spot of land. Drabix had ordered his recon teams to scour the planet and bring in a wide sample of prisoners. Now they stood in ragged ranks up and down the beach as far as Lynn Ferraro could see; perhaps thirty thousand men and women and children. Some were burned horribly.

She rode on the airlift platform with Drabix as he skimmed smoothly past them, just above their heads.

"I cant believe this," Drabix said.

What he found difficult to accept was the diversity of races represented in the population sample the recon ships had brought in. There were Bles.h.i.tes and Mosynichii in worn leathers from the worlds of 61 Cygni, there were Camogasques in prayer togas from Epsilon Eridani, there were Kopektans and Livides from Altair II and X; Millmen from Tau Ceti, Oldonians from Lalande 21185, Runaways from Rigel; stalk-thin female warriors of the Seull Clan from Delta Cephei III, beaked Raskkans from the hollow asteroids of the Whip belt, squidlike Silvinoids from Grover; Petokii and Vulpeculans and Rohrs and Mawawanias and creatures even Drabix's familiarity with the Ephemeris could not ident.i.ty.

Yet nowhere in the thousands of trembling and cursing prisoners-watching the airlift platform as it pa.s.sed them-nowhere in that horde, could be seen even one single golden-skinned, tentacle-fingered Kyben. It was this, perhaps, that Drabix found the more impossible to accept. But it was so. Of the expeditionary force sent from far Kyba to hold this crossroads planet, not one survivor remained. They had all, to the last defender, suicided.

When the knowledge could no longer be denied, Lynn turned on Drabix and denounced him with words of his own choosing, words he had frequently used to vindicate his actions during the two years she had ridden as supercargo on the Descartes. "' "War is not merely a political act but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means," as Karl von Clausewitz has so perfectly said. '"

He snarled at her. "Shut your face, Amicus! I'm not in a mood for your stupidities!"

"And slaughter is not merely an act of war, is that right, Commander? Is it also a political instrument? Why not take me to see the stacked corpses? Perhaps I can fulfill my mission...perhaps I'll learn to communicate with the dead! You deranged fool! You should be commanding an abattoir, not a ship of the line!"

He doubled his right fist and punched her full in the face, within sight of the endless swarm of helpless prisoners and his own crew. She fell backward, off the airlift, tumbling down into the throng. Their bodies broke her fall, and within seconds members of Drabix's crew had rescued her; but he did not see it; the airlift had skimmed away and was quickly lost in the flash of golden brilliance reflecting off the holy shining trees of Stand of Light.

The adjutant found her sitting on a greengla.s.s boulder jutting up from the edge of the beach. Waves came in lazily and foamed around the huge shape. There was hardly any sound. The forest was almost silent; if there were birds or insects, they had been stilled, as though waiting.

"Friend Ferraro?" he said, stepping into the water to gain her attention. He had called her twice, and she had seemed too sunk in thought to notice. Now she looked down at him and seemed to re-focus with difficulty.

"Yes, I'm sorry, what is it Mr. Lalwani?"

"The Commander would like to see you."

Her expression smoothed over like the surface of the pale blue ocean. "Where is he?"

"On the main continent, Miz. He's decided to take the forms."

She closed her eyes in pain. "Dear souls in h.e.l.l...will there never be an end? Hasn't he done enough to this wretched backwash?" Then she opened her eyes and looked at him closely. "What does he want with me? Has there been a reply from Central? Does he simply want an audience?"

"I don't know, Miz. He ordered me to come and find you. I have a recon ship waiting, whenever you're ready."

She nodded. "Thank you, Mr. Lalwani. I'll be along in a few moments."

He saluted and walked away up the beach and around the bend. She sat staring out across the ocean; as always: an observer.

They had charted the positions of the fifty "forts" during the first pa.s.s at the planet. Whether they were, in fact, forts was entirely supposition. At first they were thought to be natural rock formations-huge black cubes sunk into the earth of the tiny planet; featureless, ominous, silent-but their careful s.p.a.cing around the equator made that unlikely. And the recon ships had brought back confirmation that they were created, not natural. What they were, remained a mystery.

Lynn Ferraro stood with Drabix and stared across the empty plain to the enormous black cube, fifty meters on a side. She could not remember ever having seen anything quite so terrifying. There was no reason to feel as she did, but she could not shake the oppression, the sense of impending doom. Even so, she had resolved to say nothing to Drabix. There was nothing that could be said. Whatever motivated him, whatever pa.s.sions had come to possess him in his obsession about this planet, she knew no words she might speak to dissuade him.

"I wanted you here," he said, "because I'm still in charge of this operation, and whatever you may think of my actions I still follow orders. You're required to be in attendance, and I want that in the report."

"It's noted, Commander." He glanced at her quickly. There had been neither tone nor inflection revealing herhatred, but it trembled in the air between them.

"I expected something more from you."

She continued staring at the black, featureless cube in the middle of the plain. "Such as?''

"A comment. An a.s.sessment of military priorities. A plea to spare these cultural treasures.

Something...anything...to justify your position."

She looked at him and saw the depth of distaste he held for her. Was it her Amicus status, or herself he feared and despised. Had she been repelled less by his warrior manner, she might have pitied him-"There are men whom one hates until that moment when one sees, through a c.h.i.n.k in their armor, the sight of something nailed down and in torment."

"The validity of my position will insure you never go to s.p.a.ce again, Commander. If there were more I could do, something immediate and final, I would do it, by all the sweet dear souls in h.e.l.l. But I can't. You're in charge here, and the best I can do is record what I think insane behavior."

His anger flared again, and for a moment she thought he might hit her a second time, and she dropped back a step into a self-defense position. The first time he had taken her unaware; there would be no second time; she was capable of crippling him.

"Let me tell you a thing, Amicus, Friend of the Enemy! You follow that word all the way? The Enemy? You're a paid spy for the Enemy. An Enemy that's out to kill us, everyone of us, that will stop nowhere short of total annihilation of the human race. The Kyben feed off a hatred of humankind unknown to any other race in the galaxy..."

"My threshold for jingoism is very low, Commander. If you have some information to convey, do so.

Otherwise, I'll return to Stand of Light."

He breathed deeply, damping his rage, and when he could speak again he said, "Whether this planet has what I think it has, or not, quite clearly it's been a prize for a longtime. A long time. A jot longer than either of us can imagine. Long before the war moved into this sector. It's been conquered and reconquered and conquered all over again. The planet's lousy with every marauding race rye ever even heard of. The place is like Terran China...let itself be overrun and probably didn't even put up a fight. Let the hordes in, submitted, and waited for them to be swallowed up.

But more kept coming. There's something here they all wanted."

She had deduced as much herself; she needed no long-winded superficial lectures about the obvious. " And you think whatever it is they wanted is in the fifty forts. Have you spoken to any of the prisoners?"

"I've seen intelligence reports."

"But have you spoken to any of the prisoners personally?"

"Are you trying to make a case for incompetence, too?"

"All I asked is if you've spoken-"

"No, dammit, I haven't spoken to any of that sc.u.m!"

"Well, you should have!"

"To what end, Friend?" And he waved to his adjutant.

Drabix was in motion now. Lynn Ferraro could see there was nothing short of a.s.sa.s.sination that would stop him. And that was beyond her. "Because if you'd spoken to them, you'd have learned that whatever lives inside those forts has permitted the planet to be conquered. It doesn't care, as long as everyone minds their own business."

Drabix smiled, then snickered. "Amicus, go sit down somewhere, will you. The heat's getting to you."

"They say even the Kyben were tolerated, Commander. I'm warning you; let the forts alone.'.

"Fade off, Friend Ferraro. Command means decision, and my orders were to secure this planet. Secure doesn't mean fifty impregnable fortresses left untouched, and command doesn't mean letting bleeding hearts like you scare us into inaction with bogey men..'

The Adjutant stood waiting. "Mr. Lalwani," Drabix said, "tell the ground batteries to commence 0!1 signal.

Concentrate fire on the southern face of that cube."

"Yes, sir." He went away quickly.

"It's war, Commander. That's your only answer, that it's war?"

Drabix would not look at her now. "That's right. It's a war to the finish. They declared it, and it's been that way for forty years. I'm doing my job...and if that makes doing yours difficult, perhaps it 'II show those pimply-a.s.sed bureaucrats at Central we need more ships and less Friends of the Enemy. Something has to break this stalemate with the Kyben, and even if I don't see the end of it I'll be satisfied knowing I was the one who broke it."

He gave the signal.

From concealed positions, lancet batteries opened up on the silent black cube on the plain.

Crackling beams of leashed energy erupted from the projectors, criss-crossed as they sped toward their target and impacted on the near face of the cube. Where they struck, novae of light appeared. Drabix lowered the visor on his battle helmet. '"Protect your eyes, Friend," he warned.

Lynn dropped her visor, and heard herself shouting above the sudden crash of sound, "Let them alone!"

And in that instant she realized no one had asked the right question: where were the original natives of this world?

But it was too late to ask that question.

The barrage went on for a very long time.

Drabix was studying the southern face of the cube through a cyclop. The reports he had received were even more disturbing than the mere presence of the forts: the lancets had caused no visible damage.

Whatever formed those cubes, it was beyond the destructive capabilities of the ground batteries. The barragehad drained their power sources, and still the fort stood unscathed.

"Let them alone? Don't disturb them? Now do you see the danger, the necessity?" Drabix was spiraling upward, his frustration and anxiety making his voice brittle and high. "Tell me how we secure a war zone with the Enemy in our midst, Friend?"

"They aren't the Enemy!" she insisted.

"Leave them alone, eh?"

"They want to be left alone."

Drabix sneered at her, took one last look through the cyclop and pulled the communicator loose from his wristcuff. He spoke directly to the Descarles, hanging in s.p.a.ce above them. "Mr. Kokonen!"

The voice came back, clear and sharp. "Yes, sir?"

"On signal, pour everything you've got into the primary lancets. Hit it dead center. And keep it going till you open it up."

"On signal, sir."

"Drabix! Wait for Central to-"

"Minus three!"

"Let it alone! Let me try another-"

"Minus two!"

"Drabix...stop...."

"Minus one! Go to h.e.l.l, Friend!"

"You're out of your-"

"Commence firing!"

The lancet hurtled down out of the sky like a river of light. It struck the cube with a force that dwarfed the sum total of annihilation visited on the cube all that day. The sound rolled across the plain and the light was blinding.

Explosions came so close together they merged into one endless report, the roof of the cube bathed in withering brilliance that rivaled the sun.

Lynn Ferraro heard herself screaming, And suddenly, the lancet beam was cut off. Not from its source, but at its target. As though a giant, invisible hand had smothered the beam, it hurtled down out of the sky from the invisible dreadnought far above and ended in the sky above the cube. Then, as Drabix watched with eyes widening and the Amicus watched with open terror choking her, the beam was snuffed out all along its length. It disappeared back up its route of destructive force, into the sky, into the clouds, into the upper atmosphere and was gone.

A moment later, a new sun lit the sky as the dreadnought Descartes was strangled with its own weapon. It flared suddenly, blossomed...and was gone.

Then the cube began to rise from the earth. However much larger it was than what was revealed on the plain, Lynn Ferraro could not begin to estimate. It rose up and up, now no longer a squat cube, becoming a terrifying pillar of featureless black that dominated the sky. Somehow, she knew at forty-nine other locations around the planet the remaining forts were also rising.

After endless centuries of solitude, whatever lived in those structures was awakening at last.

They had been content to let the races of the galaxy come and go and conquer and be a.s.similated, as long as they were not severely threatened. They might have allowed humankind to come here and exist, or they might have allowed the Kyben the same freedom. But not both.

Drabix was whimpering beside her.

And not even her pity for him could save them.

He looked at her, white-eyed. "you got your wish," she said "The war is over."

The original natives of the planet were taking a hand, at last. The stalemate was broken. A third force had entered the war. And whether they would be inimical to Terrans or Kyben, no one could know. Amicus Ferraro grew cold as the cube rose up out of the plain, towering above everything.

It was clear: roused from sleep, the inhabitants of the fifty forts would never consider themselves Friends of the Enemy."How did you come to write this story?" I am frequently asked, whether it be this story, or that one over there, or the soft pink-and-white one in the corner. Usually, I shrug helplessly. My ideas come from the same places yours come from: Compulsion City, about half an hour out of Schenectady. I can't give a more specific location than that. Once in a great while, I know specifically. The story that follows is one of those instances, and I will tell you. I attended the 22nd World Science Fiction Convention (Pacificon 11) on Labor Day, 1964. For the past many "cons," a feature has been a fan-art exhibit, with artwork entered by non-professionals from all over the science fiction world. Several times (for some as-yet-unexplained reason) I have been asked to be among the judges of this show, and have found the level of work to be pleasantly high, in some cases really remarkable. On half a dozen occasions I have found myself wondering why the certain ill.u.s.trator that impressed me was not working deep in the professional scene; and within a year, invariably, that artist has left the amateur ranks and become a selling ill.u.s.trator. At the Pacificon, once again I attended the fan-art exhibition. I was in the company of Robert Silverberg, a writer whose name wilt not be unfamiliar to you, and the then-editor of Amazing Stories, Cele Goldsmith Lalli (the Lalli had only recently been added, when that handsome bachelor lady finally threw in the sponge and married Mr. Lalli, in whose direction dirty looks for absconding with one of the ablest editors s-f had yet produced). Cele had been trying vainly to get a story out of me. I was playing coy. There had been days when the cent or cent-and-a-half Amazing Stories paid was mucho dinero to me, but now I was A Big Time Hollywood Writer (it says here somewhere) and I was enjoying saying stupid things like, "you can't afford me, Cele," or "I'll see if Joseph E. Levine will let me take off a week to write one for you...I'll have my agent call you." Cele was taking it staunchly. Since I was much younger, and periodically disrupted her efficient Ziff-Davis office, she had tolerated me with a stoic resign only faintly approached by The Colossus of Rhodes. "Okay, okay, big shot," she was replying, " I'll stretch it to two cents a word, and we both know you're being overpaid. " I sneered, and marched away. I t was something of a running gunbattle for two days. But, in point of fact, I was so tied up with prior commitments in television (that was my term of menial servitude on "The Outer Limits") that I knew I didn't have the time for short stories, much as I l.u.s.ted to do a few, to keep my hand in. That Sunday morning in September, we were at the fan-art exhibit, and I was stopped in front of a display of scratchboard ill.u.s.trations by a young man named Dennis Smith, from Chula Vista, California.

They were extraordinary efforts, combining, the best features of Finlay, Lawrence and Heinrich Kley. They were youthfully derivative, of course, but professionally executed, and one of them held me utterly fascinated. It was a scene on a foggy landscape, with a milk-wash of stars dripping down the sky, a dim outline of battlements in the distance, and in the foreground, a weird phosph.o.r.escent creature with great luminous eyes, holding a bag of skulls, astride a giant rat, padding toward me. I stared at it for a long while, and a small group of people cl.u.s.tered behind me, also held by the picture. "If somebody would buy that, I'd write the story for it," I heard myself say. And from behind me, Cele Goldsmith Lalli's margarine-warm voice replied, "I'll buy it for Fantastic; you've got an a.s.signment." I was trapped. h.e.l.l hath no fury like the wrath of an editor with single-minded devotion to duty.

Around that strange, remarkable drawing, I wrote a story, one of my personal favorites. Dennis Smith had named the picture, so I felt it only seemly to t.i.tle the story the same: