We stopped for the "night"-actually, the sun wouldn't set for another seventy hours-atop a slight rise some ten clicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren't aliens, I had to remind myself-we were.
Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours' sleep and had two hours' guard duty.
Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency.
"Hi, Marygay."
"Oh, William," her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. "God, it's so horrible."
"It's over now…"
"I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the…"
I put my hand on her knee. The contact made a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. "Don't feel singled out, Marygay, whatever guilt there is belongs evenly to all of us…but a triple portion for Cor…"
"You privates quit jawin' and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours."
"O.K., Sarge." Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn't bear it. I felt if I could only touch her I could drain off the sadness like a ground wire draining current but we were each trapped in our own plastic world.
"G'night, William."
"Night." It's almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body's response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be soon, cranking up the pro-creative derrick for one last try…lovely thoughts like this, and I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through the world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day…
"Mandella-wake up, damn it, your shift!"
I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for God knows what…but I was so weary I couldn't keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I'd pay for it later.
For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far; the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.
Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn't squeeze.
"Movement!"
"Movement!"
"Holdyour fire. Don't shoot!"
"Movement."
"Movement." I looked left and right and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind dumb creatures standing right in front of him.
Maybe the drug I'd taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn't quite hear it, want to respond but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.
The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn't know. "All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. Don't make any quick gestures…anybody got a headache or anything?"
"Sergeant, this is Hollister." Lucky.
"They're trying to say something…I can almost…no, just…"
"Well?"
"All I can get is that they think we're…think we're…well, funny. They aren't afraid."
"You mean the one in front of you isn't…"
"No, the feeling comes from all of them, they're all thinking the same thing. Don't ask me how I know, I just do."
"Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho."
"Maybe. I don't feel like they're dangerous. Just curious about us."
"Sergeant, this is Bohrs."
"Yeah."
"The Taurans have been here at least a year-maybe they've learned how to communicate with these…overgrown teddy-bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back…"
"I don't think they'd show themselves, if that were the case," Lucky said. "They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they want to."
"Anyhow," Cortez said, "if they're spies, the damage has been done. Don't think it'd be smart to take any action against them. I know you'd all like to see 'em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we'd better be careful."
I didn't want to see them dead, but I'd just as soon not see them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn't seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.
"O.K., all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody's been hurt. Tell your people we're moving out in one minute."
I don't know what Cortez expected, but of course the creatures just followed right along. They didn't keep us surrounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren't going to tire out.
We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it: we were still thirty clicks from the enemy base; fifteen hours' marching at the least. And though one could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the 'tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second 'tab, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person would fidget for hours, deciding whether to have breakfast.
Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy-bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped "broadcasting." Cortez's decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the Seventh Platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were the only ones to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day's horrors, I found that I really just didn't give a damn.