The trackbeams probed outward, scouring the ground for landmines planted by the foot-soldiers, and exploded them on contact, then moved on. Eventually, they probed at the firm outer shell of the White perimeter. Then the charged trackbeams of White met the Black beams, and they locked. They locked in a deadly struggle, and at opposite ends of those beams, men at control panels, in shock helmets, poured power to their beams, in a visible struggle to beat down the strength of the other.
A surge, a slight edge, a nudge of force, and White was dominant. The beam raced back the length of the weakened Black beam, and in a dome two hundred miles away, a man leaped from his bucket seat and clawed at his helmet…even as his eyes spouted flame, and his mouth crawed open in a ghastly scream. His charred body—burnt black inside—turned half-around, writhing, as the man beat at his dead face, and then he fell across his console. The trackbeam was loose inside the bunker. In a matter of moments, no living thing moved in the bunker dome. But it was a double-edged weapon, for associate trackbeams of the doomed White had centered in, and now five of them joined in racing back along the Black’s length. The scene in the White bunker dome was repeated. This time a woman had been under the helmet.
So it went. All day. One skirmish of foot-soldiers with ensnaring nets who stumbled across a Black detonation team, near Abulfeda Crater ended strangely, and terribly.
The detonation team was wrapped in the gooey meshes, but had barely enough time to toss their charges. The charges exploded, killing the ensnaring outfit, but also served to shatter their own helmets. They lay there for minutes, those whose helmets had merely cracked, until their air ran out, and then they strangled to death. The ones who died initially were the lucky.
At day’s end, at 1630 hours, the death toll was slightly below average for a weekend. Dead: 5,886. Wounded: 4. Damages: twelve billion dollars, rounded off by the Finance & Reclamation Clerk. The batteries were silent, the crabs back in their depots and pools; the airless dead face of the moon left to the reclamation teams, who worked through the “night, “ preparing for Monday rooming, when the war would resume.
The commuters were racked, and as the Blacks filed into their ships, as the Whites boarded theirs, the humming of great atomic motors rolled through the shining corridors of the commuters. Inside, men read newspapers and clung to the acceleration straps for the ride down.
Down to Earth.
For a quiet evening at home, and a quiet Sunday… before the war started again.
Almost as one, they roared free of the slight gravity, and plunged down toward the serene, carefully-tended face of the Earth. The young lieutenant hung from his strap and tried to block out the memory of what had happened that day. Not the fighting. God, that had been just fine. It had been good. The fighting. But what the older men had said. That was like saying there was no God. The moon was for war, the Earth was for peace.
They had knifed a battery sergeant on his way down? He looked about him, but all faces were turned into newspapers. He tried to put it from his mind forcefully.
Behind the commuters, the blasted, crushed and death-sprayed face of the Moon glowed in sharp relief against the black of space.
What had the Major said later:
War is good, but we have to retain our perspective.
Yolande was in the kitchen dialing dinner when the chimes crooned at her. She turned from the difficult task of dictating dinner to the robochef, and wiped a stray lock of ebony hair from her forehead.
“Bill! Bill, will you answer it…it’s probably Wayne and Lotus.”
In the living room, 2/Lt. William Larkspur Donnough uncrossed his long legs, sighed as he turned off the tri-V, and yelled back softly, “Okay, hon. I’ll get it.”
He walked down the long pastel-tiled hall and flipped up the force screen dial, releasing the wall into nothingness. As the wall flicked out and was gone, the outside took form, and standing on Bill and Yolande Donnough’s front breezeway were 2/Lt. and Mrs. Wayne M’Kuba Massaro.
“Come on in, come on in, “ Bill chuckled at them. “Yo’s in the kitch fixing dinner. Here, Lotus, let me have your hood.”
He took the brightly-tinted hood and cape offered by the girl, a striking Melanesian with an upturned Irish nose and flaming red hair.
He accepted Wayne Massaro’s service cap in the other hand and stuck the apparel to the rack, which turned into the wall, holding the clothing magnetically.
“What’ll you have, Wayne, Lotus?”
Lotus raised a hand to signify none for her, but Wayne Massaro made a T with his hands. He wanted a tea- ball with a shot of herro-coke.
When Bill had jiggered the mixture together, warmed it and chilled it again, when they settled down in the formfit chairs, Donnough looked across at the other lieutenant and sighed. “Well, how’d it go your first day up there?”
Massaro frowned deeply.
Lotus broke in before her husband could answer. “Well, if you two are going to talk shop, I’m going in to see if Yo needs help; “ She got up, smoothed the sheath across her thighs, and walked into the kitchen.
“She’ll never get used to my making the war a career,” Wayne Massaro shook his head in affectionate exasperation. “She just can’t understand it. “
“She’ll get used to it,” Bill replied, sipping his own hiskotch. “Lotus still has a lot of that Irish blood in her… Yo was the same way when I came in.”
“It’s so different, Bill So very different. What they taught us in the Academy doesn’t seem quite true up there. I mean—” he struggled to form the right phrase, “—it’s not that they’re going against doctrine…it’s just that things aren’t black and white up there—as they said they’d be when I was in the Academy—they’re grey now. They don’t start the morning bombardments on time, they drink coff when they should be posting, and—and—” He stopped abruptly, and a hardness came into the set of his head. He jerked quickly, and bent to his drink.
“N-nothing,” he murmured, principally to himself.
Donnough looked disturbed.
“What happened, Wayne? You flinch-out when the barrage came over?”
Massaro lifted his eyes in a shocked and startled expression. “You aren’t kidding, are you?”
Donnough leaned back further, and the formfit closed about him like a womb. “No, I suppose I wasn’t. I know you better than that, known you too long.”
There was a great deal of respect and friendship in his words. Each man sat silently, holding his drink to his lips. as a barricade to conversation for the moment. Filtered memories of shared boyhoods came to them, and talk was not right at that moment.
Then Massaro lowered the glass and said, “That jato raid came off pretty badly didn’t it?” The subject had been altered.
Donnough nodded ruefully, “Yeah, wouldn’t you know it. Oh, hell, it was all the fault of that gravel-brained Colonel Levinson. He didn’t even send over a force battery cover. It was suicide. But then, what the hell, that’s what they’re paid for.”
Massaro agreed silently and took a final pull at the tea-laced highball. “Uh. Good. More, daddy, morel” Donnough waved a hand at the circle-dial of the robot bartender set into the recreation unit against the wan.
“Dial away, brother frat man. I’m too comfortable to move.”
A gaggle of female giggles erupted from the kitchen, and Yolande Donnough’s voice came through the grille in the ceiling. “Okay you two heroes…dinner’s on. Let’s go.” Then: “Bill, will you call the kids from downstairs?
“Okay, Yo.”
Bill Donnough walked to the dropshaft at one corner of the living room, and slid his fingernail across the grille set into the wall beside the empty pit. Downstairs, in the lower levels of the house—sunk fifty feet into the Earth—the Donnough children heard the rasp over their own speakers, and waited for their father’s words.
“Chow’s on, monsters. Updecks on the double!”
The children came tumbling from their rooms and the play area, and threw themselves into the sucking force of the invisible riser-beam that lived in the dropshaft. In a second they were whisked up the shaft and stepped out in the living room:
First came Polly with her golden braids tied atop her round little head in the Swedish style. Her hands were clean. Then Bartholemew-Aaron, whose nose was running again, and whose sleeves showed it. Verushka came next, her little face frozen with tears, for Toby had bitten her calf on the way upshaft; then Toby himself, clutching his side where Verushka had kicked him in reflex.
Donnough shook his head in mock severity, and slapped Polly on the behind as he urged them to the table for dinner. “Go on you beasts, roust!”
All but Verushka, the children ran laughing to the dining hall which ran parallel to the tiled front hall of the house. Dark-haired Verushka clung to her daddy’s hand and walked slowly with him. “Daddy, are you goin’ to the moon tomorra’?”
“That’s right, baby. Why?”
“Cause Stacy Garmonde down the block says her old ma—”
“Father, not old man!” he corrected her.