A matter for men, p.48
A Matter for Men, page 48
part #1 of War Against the Chtorr Series
"At least a half-hour. Remember what happened to that team in Idaho."
"Right." Duke said, "There was a lot in that report to worry about."
"You mean the tunnels?"
"Yeah. If the worms are changing their nesting behavior . . ." He didn't finish the sentence; he didn't need to. The job was already difficult enough.
I studied the wall some more. There was no evidence of a hidden exit.
"Do you want to send in the Robe?" asked Larry. The blimp had also dropped a meter-high mechanical walker—a more sophisticated version of Shlep, the Mobe, only it didn't have Shlep's good looks or personality.
"No," said Duke.
Larry argued for it half-heartedly for a few moments, then trailed off. Duke didn't reply. I couldn't see either of them. There was just me and the wall.
"Jim?"
"Yeah, Duke?"
"You want to switch positions?"
"Naw, I'm fine."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"All right."
The wall was unchanged. Something very small and loud buzzed around me. A stingfly? It was too fast to see. I waved it away with one gloved hand.
"Burrell? Time check."
"Twelve minutes, thirty seconds."
"Thank you."
I could feel myself sweating. I was starting to feel clammy inside the insulated battle-suit. I wished the fourth goddamn worm would quit waiting and come on out already. "Come on, worm! I've got a nice cold bath for you! Just the thing for a hot summer afternoon!"
There was silence.
Something hooted.
I found myself growing drowsy. I shook myself back awake; I stamped my feet, jumping back and forth from leg to leg for a moment.
I squeezed the trigger, just a touch, and let loose a cold cloud of freezing steam. It put a chill into the summer air and a cold pain into the eyes. Water droplets crystalized and pattered on the ground. That would keep me awake for a bit.
We'd been freezing worms for a month now. It was still a new technique. I didn't like it. It was more dangerous. And you still needed a backup man standing by with a torch, just in case.
But Denver had this idea that if you could freeze a Chtorran, then you could map it internally, so we'd been freezing them and sending them to the photo-isotomography lab in San Jose. I'd seen the process once. It was impressive.
You take a frozen Chtorran, you put it up on a big frame and you point a camera at one end. Then you start taking thin slices off of it, taking a picture of the cross section after each slice. You do this with the entire worm. Then you give the pictures to the computer.
The computer gives you back a three-dimensional map of the internal structures of the Chtorran body. Using a joystick and a screen you can move around inside the map and examine specific organs and their relationships to each other. We still didn't know half of what we were looking at, but at least we had something to look at now.
The process had been successfully completed with four gastropedes of varying sizes. We didn't know why, but they seemed to be from four different species. Denver was going to keep freezing and mapping worms until the discrepancies were resolved.
"Duke," I said.
"Yeah?"
"Why do you think the fourth worm always waits so long to attack?"
"Beats the hell out of me."
"Yeah. Well, thanks anyway."
"No trouble at all, son. If you don't ask questions, how will you ever learn anything?"
The wall in front of me began to bulge.
I studied it offhandedly. Odd. I'd never seen a wall do that.
It bulged a little more. Yes, the dome was definitely being pushed out of shape. I raised the nozzle and pointed it directly at the center of the bulge.
"Duke, I think we got something. Burrell, pay careful attention now. I'll show you how this is done."
The dome began to crack ominously. The crack suddenly stitched up from the ground and across and then down again, and then the outlined piece began to topple outward—
"CHTORRRRRRR!! CHTORRRRRRRRR!!" This worm was the largest of them all! Was there no limit to their growth? Or was this the adult form?
It came sliding toward me like a freight train. I pulled the trigger and screamed and released a cloud of icy steam and a deadly spray of freezing liquid nitrogen. It spread out in sheets, enveloping the Chtorran. For a moment, it was hidden by the clouds and spray, and then it came plunging through, its fur streaked with white and icicles.
"Hold your torches!" I shouted, but it kept coming! And then, in a single startling instant of terror, the Chtorran raised itself up and up and up! The worm was three tons huge! It towered above me, crackling, wreathed in shining ice and silvery burning steam! And in that moment of deadly cold confrontation, I thought for sure that this was finally it—this brilliant beast of hell was about to topple down across me! This final frozen fury would be its last revenge! And then, instead, the momentum of its upward thrust continued and it began to slowly teeter sideways, farther and farther, until at last it toppled and came crackling and crashing down across the ground like a mountain of collapsing, shattering ice.
I could smell the cold like a knife within my brain, across my eyes. The pain of it was exquisite! The Chtorran was a fallen chimney. It lay shattered on the ground. Its fur was crystalizing in the sun, the ice was streaked along its sides in sheets and sprays and icicles. Something inside the creature exploded softly with a muffled thump—and as if in answer, one of its arms broke quietly off and slid and clattered to the ground.
How many more?
I turned away from the shining carcass and looked to the mountains climbing away to the north and west. How many more were out there? This was the twentieth I'd killed. But I didn't feel joyous—I felt only frustration. The job was taking too long!
The noise of the choppers pulled me back to the present. The first of the landing craft were already dropping down over the hill. They'd be bringing the rest of my science team and our equipment.
The security squad was just following the Robe unit into the hut. Not until they'd searched every room and tunnel would anybody else be allowed to enter. It was fine by me. I'd seen my share of worm huts. They were starting to look all alike to me.
For just a moment I felt tired. I didn't feel my usual exhilaration. I didn't even feel satisfied.
"Jim?" That was Duke, an ever-present voice in my ears, in the middle of my head.
"I'm fine," I responded.
"Good. Check out the corral, will you?"
"Right." I secured the freeze machine and headed around the dome. It didn't matter how I felt. That was irrelevant—I still had a job to do. I climbed up the ramp and looked down into the corral.
And everything in the world stopped.
The corral wasn't empty.
There was a teddy bear in it—a piece of a teddy bear.
The tears welled up in my eyes and I just skidded back down to the ground and sat there on the hard dry earth and bawled like a baby. All the tension came flooding out at once—
"Goddammit!! Goddammit!! Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!" I raged. "We should have been here earlier! We shouldn't have waited!"
I looked up and there was Duke.
"You son of a bitch! I let you talk me into waiting—" I wanted to punch his heart out. Instead, I pounded the dirt as hard as could.
Duke climbed up to the top of the ramp, looked down into the corral and then climbed back down and squatted on the ground in front of me. He stared earnestly into my eyes, but he didn't speak. He waited until I was ready.
"I'm sorry, Duke—"
"For what? For feeling what we all feel?"
"For showing it—"
He shook his head. "The day you stop showing it is the day I'll start worrying about you." He reached over and squeezed my shoulder, hard. "Everybody's crazy, Jim. All we can do anymore is try to keep our craziness manageable. Okay?"
"Okay—"
Duke nodded toward the corral. "Jim—that's why we're here. All of us. Don't forget that."
And then I was alone again. I levered myself wearily back to my feet.
Duke was right. There was nothing else on Earth that I wanted to do more than this. Somebody had to make sure that there wasn't a next little girl in a brown dress or a next little piece of a teddy bear.
And there was—oddly enough—a profound comfort in that realization.
Yes, everybody's crazy, even me—but at the same time, not me. Not totally and not anymore. Because I had this job and it was do-able and as long as that was true, then the whole thing wasn't quite as out of control as everybody said. And at least, that was a place to start.
Despite all the horror and all the craziness and all the purple nightmares that were stalking the countryside—despite the shit-storm of insanity that just kept coming down—life was still possible.
And if life had turned nastier and shorter, then so what? We'd just get meaner and tougher in response. And we'd cherish our good times a whole lot harder.
Yeah, I was crazy—but I was going to make the worms a whole lot crazier.
I brushed the dirt off my pants and started back toward the landing site to collect the rest of my team.
Already I was thinking about tomorrow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID GERROLD made his television writing debut with the now classic "The Trouble With Tribbles" episode of the original Star Trek© series. Since 1967 he has story-edited three TV series, edited five anthologies, and written two non-fiction books about television production (both of which have been used as textbooks) and over a dozen novels, three of which have been nominated for the prestigious Hugo awards.
His television credits include multiple episodes of Star Trek, Tales From the Darkside, Twilight Zone, The Real Ghostbusters, Logan's Run, and Land of the Lost.
His novels include When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One Release 2.0, The Man Who Folded Himself, Voyage of the Star Wolf, as well as his popular War Against the Chtorr books—A Matter for Men, A Day for Damnation, A Rage for Revenge, and A Season for Slaughter, His short stories have appeared in most of the major science fiction magazines, including Galaxy, If, Amazing, and Twilight Zone.
Gerrold has also published columns and articles in Starlog, Profiles, Infoworld, Creative Computing, Galileo, A-Plus, and other scince fiction and computing periodicals. He averages over two dozen lecture appearances a year and also teaches screenwriting at Pepperdine University.
David Gerrold is currently working on the new Chtorr book and an all-new science fiction duology.
David Gerrold, A Matter for Men
