Thumbed the radio. "Duke? Sergeant Kelly? Dr. Obama? Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me? This is—this is Lieutenant James Edward McCarthy. Can anybody hear me?"

  Static.

  Shit.

  Came up the slope toward the camp—and saw the bath house.

  It looked overgrown.

  If I'd been gone a year—okay; but I'd been gone less than months

  The black basil stuff was nearly as high as I was, and it spread out like bamboo. The midnight ivy was crawling up the sides of the building and had nearly reached the top. The blue fungus was a carpet, sprawling outward in all directions. And all those black shiny things, they had to be—

  Millipedes.

  Hundreds of them. All sizes.

  They were milling around aimlessly, sometimes raising themselves up to sniff the air. They had red bellies.

  Several of them were sniffing in my direction, and then a few more, and then suddenly all of them were moving toward me.

  Oh, shit.

  This was not a good idea.

  The robots were worse than useless here. They couldn't detect the millipedes. There was no target large enough for them to lock on to. And I didn't have time to explain to them—these bugs looked hungry.

  I decided not to wait for the whites of their eyes. I fired. The flame-thrower coughed and roared. The flame splattered out and burned the thickest part of them. The millipedes scorched and crisped and curled up like cinders—but they kept on coming, the whole damn swarm.

  I had an idea.

  I squatted as low to the ground as I could. I could bend the one leg, but I had to stick the other one out at an uncomfortable angle. This was going to be painful. I refocused the flame so it laid out flat and began turning around slowly, splashing the fire across the ground in a searing orange spray.

  The flames swept across the hard-baked earth in a deadly arc. The millipedes disappeared in smoke and fire; they popped as they exploded. Sometimes the shells went spinning into the air, whirling in a comical flurry; sometimes they skittered sideways across the ground.

  And then they were gone.

  I straightened slowly—one knee popped, the other leg ached—and turned around carefully.

  There were still a few millipedes scuttling off in the distance, but they were no longer interested in me. The air was heavy with the smell of gasoline and grease and smoke. The burning millipedes still crackled, their shells popping and bursting on the ground.

  I picked my way carefully through the debris and blackened earth toward the bath house. I kicked at the door, but it didn't give. "Anyone in there?" I kicked again. "Open up! It's McCarthy!"

  No answer.

  I backed away from the door and began circling the bath house carefully. The midnight-colored ivy crunched under my boots. I wondered if there were millipedes hiding under the broad leaves and backed even farther away.

  The Chtorran fungus dripped in great sheets from the shadowed back of the bath house. It covered the whole wall. There were dark purplish nodules growing in the fungus now, they were linked by stringy veins, and there were thousands of little red bugs crawling up and down, in and out. It was hideous. The ripe cheesy smell it gave off was as repellent as a three-day corpse.

  Also back here, some of the black basil-like plants were already taller than I was. They were becoming a forest. The tallest ones were blossoming with tiny white buds nestled in the thickest part of their leaves. Their sweet scent was delicious and cloying and almost overpowering. Mingled with the smell of the fungus, the effect was nauseating.

  And I noticed something else—red creepers: thick ropy vines that stretched out across the dirt toward the pine forest beyond. I hadn't seen these before. These weren't something I'd transplanted—

  I was still puzzling about that as I limped back around to the front of the bath house and saw it.

  A half-melted totem pole.

  It looked like somebody had poured shelterfoam over various sized balloons and then popped some of the balloons.

  I stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out what it was—

  It looked a lot like the one I'd seen in front of the worm nest.

  I'd missed it from the road because of the angle.

  Oh, my God.

  That's when it hit me—how stupid I was.

  How totally completely, and absolutely blind, stupid, bull-headed wrong!

  This was my fault. All of it.

  The plants. The millipedes. Everything.

  It was the smells—pheromones!—or whatever the Chtorran equivalent was, that had attracted the millipedes here.

  A male gypsy moth would fly kilometers tracking the wind-borne scent of a single female gypsy moth. The creature had no choice in the matter. It was a biological machine programmed to do one thing and one thing only—reproduce or die trying.

  What were Chtorran bugs programmed for?

  Eating. Breeding.

  How far would a Chtorran creature track the smells of its homeworld vegetation—and everything those delicious, overripe smells promised?

  The bath house smelled like a Chtorran farm, a settlement; probably the only settlement on this side of the mountain.

  Every Chtorran creature for fifty kilometers must be headed in this direction.

  And I'd done it.

  In my blissful, idiotic, innocent ignorance, I'd planted these goddamn samples, tended them lovingly, and encouraged them to grow.

  And then I'd left—leaving Duke and the others here unsuspecting as bait.

  And then something had come along, found my little purple garden, and taken it over as its own.

  Those red creepers. I hadn't planted those. I'd never seen anything like them before. But they were Chtorran, there was no doubt of it; the way they wound in and out of the other plants—everything about them, the gnarly look, the ruby smell—they were as Chtorran as the rest of these horrors.

  Somebody or something else had planted these vines here.

  Alpha Bravo didn't belong to us anymore.

  What was in the bath house?

  I thought about how close I'd come to kicking in the door and backed away, shuddering.

  I circled slowly again, watching for the millipedes—apparently they'd learned. Or maybe I'd burned out the heart of the swarm. They'd been clustered mostly in one place; maybe they were all dead. Or maybe the rest were just hiding. Comforting thought, that.

  I thumbed the robots to full-alert. I left one watching the bath house, I wasn't sure why, and sent the other on ahead of me, up toward the main buildings of the camp.

  Dr. Obama's cabin was a ruin. It had been caved out. Pulled apart. Chewed up. It was rubble.

  I approached cautiously, but I didn't try to go in. Something in that mess smelled terrible. I sent the robot circling around the other side. It didn't find anything either.

  We continued up the slope, the robot and I.

  The main building had a big hole in one wall—again that caved out look, as if something had grabbed ahold of the whole wall and just pulled. There was no evidence of a firefight of any kind. I sent the robot around the building once. It came back chirruping softly. Nothing. Yet.

  I peered into the shadowed gloom. The brightness of the day had left me half-blind.

  How long ago had all this happened? It had to be recent. Satellite communications were exchanged with all the stations nearly every day; the ground lines were unreliable. If Denver had lost contact with Alpha Bravo, the chopper wouldn't have dropped me off so nonchalantly—would it?

  Would it?

  I mean, somebody would have started to worry or wonder, wouldn't they? And then somebody else would have punched some buttons on a console and taken a look at the pictures from one of the North American Surveillance skyballs. Or maybe they would even have scheduled an overflight drone. At the very least, they would have had the chopper do a once-around before dropping me off—

  Wouldn't they?

  So, this was too recent and Denver didn't know.

  Or . . . My paranoia floated to the surface again.

  Maybe they did know. And maybe this was one more attempt to get rid of me in a nice, polite, accidental-looking way.

  Except, why bother?

  That's the thing about paranoia. It makes you think you're important enough to be worth the trouble to persecute. Obviously, I'm so important that all those other important people have to stop whatever else they're doing and dedicate large portions of their time and energy into tracking me down and making my life miserable.

  Naw. It didn't wash. I was perfectly capable of screwing up my life and making myself truly miserable without any outside help.

  My eyes were watering from the heat, from the dust, and from trying to squint into the shadowed gloom of the deserted mess hall. And my head hurt like the inside of a cannon. Like a thousand manic elves were having a conversation about me, but so softly that I couldn't make out a word they were saying.

  I took a step sideways and another step forward. Something tiny scuttled across the floor of the mess hall. I heard it, couldn't see it.

  "Okay," I said to myself. "You're smart. Figure it out. When did this happen? And where's Duke."

  Duke wouldn't have been caught by surprise.

  There was no evidence here of a fight of any kind.

  Maybe they'd moved out. Evacuated? Even retreated—a retreat would be okay. At least they'd still be alive.

  Or maybe they were out on a mission of some kind—reconnaissance or surveillance or something, anything—and didn't know yet. Maybe they were on their way back even now.

  Yes. That made sense.

  That was something I could believe in.

  The something in the mess hall scuttled again and this time I saw it.

  It was a rat. Dark and ugly-looking, it had bright gleaming eyes—and it was big enough to worry a small dog.

  Yes. If there was one Earth species that would find itself a niche in the Chtorran ecology, it would have to be the rat.

  My dad had once said that the rat was the official mascot of the American Bar Association. It was several years before I understood the joke, but it still floated to the top of my memory every time I thought of either rats or lawyers. The difference between the rat and the lawyer is that the rat doesn't have a choice.

  The rat was dragging something.

  It looked like a bone. A finger bone.

  So much for the theory that they were all away on a mission.

  Maybe it wasn't a finger bone. Maybe it was a chicken bone or something else. Maybe the rats had gotten into the refrigerators or the pantry. I didn't know. I couldn't tell.

  The rat vanished with its prize into the debris of the building.

  I brought the robot around behind me and told it to probe with its lights. They swiveled out and into place; four bright beams began sweeping back and forth across the ruined mess hall, illuminating clearly the broken tables, the crumpled beams, the shattered furniture.

  The wall had been pulled out and some thing or things had charged in and—

  —and what?

  Torn the place apart.

  But why?

  A battle, I could understand—but destruction without a purpose? Was this something new from the worms?

  There were no bodies.

  Either they'd all been eaten, or they hadn't been here when it happened.

  Damn!

  I whirled around angrily. "Duke! Goddammit!! Sergeant Kelly?!! Anyone?!!"

  No answer. Just the echo of my own voice off the hills and the mountains.

  I kicked aside a broken chair, stepped past a broken beam, and stepped into the darkest part of the mess hall.

  And saw the hole in the floor.

  It was a very big hole.

  The floor had been torn up and the dirt had been pushed aside, and the hole went in sideways and became a tunnel, ramping downward and curving visibly around to the right.

  Of course.

  It made sense.

  Something smells good. It smells like home. The worms come to investigate. It smells good, but it tastes terrible—tastes like brick. But the farm has been started, so you look around for a good place to put down the nest; someplace with a convenient supply of lumber and food. Building a homestead is hard work.

  I backed away from the hole quickly.

  I didn't know how deep it went and I didn't care. Maybe the worms were inside and maybe they weren't. Maybe they were out hunting. Maybe they were all lying together in a torpid mass. And maybe they were just singing arias in the shower.

  And maybe this was one time I didn't want to know.

  I'd already made up my mind. I was never going into another worm nest as long as I lived. I figured I'd live a lot longer that way.

  I stepped back out into the sunshine and softly began programming the robot, being careful to speak my orders very clearly and crisply. If anything came up out of that hole and it wasn't human, it wasn't going to live very long either.

  A quick circuit of the rest of the camp revealed that most of the other cabins had been pulled down too. The worms were thorough. But that also meant that they'd had time to rip this station apart. How long would that have taken? A few hours? No, that hole was evidence that they'd been here for a few days.

  I circled stiffly around the back of the car pool.

  It was empty.

  There was only the one Jeep here; it was the one with the lousy suspension, still up on the rack. The others were gone.

  I stared at it for a moment before I realized what it had to mean, and when I did, I almost started laughing in relief.

  Somebody had gotten out.

  No. Wait a minute. If they had known about the attack, they'd have radioed. They'd have gotten the word to Denver.

  So they couldn't have known.

  Maybe Duke hadn't known that there was a supply chopper coming in and had packed up almost everything and everybody and taken the Jeeps on a three-day inspection of the region. He'd done it before. And then when the message arrived about the supply chopper, it would have been routinely acknowledged by the computer: "Nobody's home right now, but please leave your message. We'll get back to you as soon as we're through burning worms."

  Or maybe the message had been put on the network and nobody noticed that an acknowledgment had never been received. And if nobody noticed, then nobody would have ordered any surveillance. And whatever had happened here had happened three days ago.

  I could almost believe that.

  And maybe Dr. Obama and Sergeant Kelly and whoever else had stayed behind had taken advantage of this opportunity to—to go somewhere else for a while. Maybe nobody had been here at all when—

  What I wouldn't believe, what I couldn't accept, was that Duke and the others could be overpowered so easily. They were too smart, too wary. Too—

  No.

  It didn't happen. It hadn't happened. It hadn't!

  I wouldn't believe it.

  Not yet.

  Not ever.

  50

  The Last Day

  "If God didn't want men to masturbate, then why did he make the opposable thumb?"

  "If God didn't want women to masturbate, then why did she make the middle finger longest?"

  —SOLOMON SHORT

  It was my worst nightmare.

  Whitlaw was standing over my chair, looming like a mountain, glaring down at me and waiting for an answer to his question.

  "So . . . McCarthy. What is responsibility?"

  I didn't have the slightest idea.

  And I was certain that this was it—I would stammer something and it would be wrong and Whitlaw would finally lose patience and just kill me.

  Or worse—he'd savage me with one of his exquisitely sarcastic observations about my lack of intellectual capacity. And then I'd die of embarrassment.

  Whitlaw had long ago stopped waiting for us to raise our hands. We didn't. We thought that was the best way to avoid being held up to ridicule. But the man had us surrounded, and if we didn't volunteer, then he'd start to call on us, one at a time. Today, he had lowered his voice to a shout—and he was demanding that we "participate in the process of our own lives." You couldn't tune him out.

  That was the thing about Whitlaw's class. There was no place to hide. If you sat in the back of the room, hoping not to be noticed, Whitlaw would stride to the back, take the comic book out of your hands, rip it up, and drop it in the trash. Then he'd move you up to the front of the room.

  His radar was unerring. If you went for more than three days without raising your hand to comment or to ask a question, he'd start calling on you. "Just checking to see if you're still alive," he'd say. "I've already given up all hope of intelligent discourse from this collection of somnambulists. Cabbages have more crunch than you do."

  On this particular day, he'd begun his attack with a diversionary maneuver. He'd said, "Let's review what we've covered so far. You'll remember that we determined that there really is no such thing as rights or freedom. What there is, is responsibility. Hmm," he said, and stopped. He froze at the board, stylus still in hand. He turned back to us, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Responsibility. There's an interesting word. We haven't really defined it, have we?" He put the stylus down in the tray below the board and brushed nonexistent chalk dust from his hands; that's how old he was.

  He looked at me with a piercing expression. "I mean, we've talked about it all semester long. We've all used the word as if we're agreed on what it means. But I don't think we're in agreement at all. I don't think we're all thinking of the same thing when we use the word responsibility—"

  I was already starting to sweat. Some of these lectures could on for a week or more. And this one had all the earmarks.

  Whitlaw stepped past me. For a man with a limp, he could be surprisingly limber. He headed for the back of the room and I breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed in my chair.

  "McCarthy," he said, terrifyingly close behind me. He had turned and was studying the back of my head. "You start. What is responsibility?"

 

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