“Greetings from your commanding officer,” an amplified voice thundered from loudspeakers on the fence. “This is a recorded announcement. You are now attempting to leave the combat zone and enter the restricted headquarters zone. This is forbidden. Your presence has been detected by automatic machinery, and these same devices now have a number of guns trained upon you. They will fire in sixty seconds if you do not leave. Be patriotic, marl Do your duty. Death to the Chingers! Fifty-five seconds. Would you like your mother to know that her boy is a coward? Fifty seconds. Your Emperor has invested a lot of money in your trainingis this the way that you repay him? Forty-five seconds …”
Bill cursed and shot up the nearest loudspeaker, but the voice continued from others down the length of the fence. He turned and went back the way he had come.
As he neared his barracks, skirting the front line to avoid the fire from the nervous guards in the buildings, all the lights went out. At the same time gunfire and bomb explosions broke out on every side.
IV
Something slithered close by in the mud and Bill’s trigger finger spontaneously contracted and he shot it. In the brief atomic flare he saw the smoking remains of a dead Venian, as well as an unusually large number of live Venians squelching to the attack. Bill dived aside instantly, so that their return fire missed him, and fled in the opposite direction. His only thought was to save his skin, and this he did by getting as far from the firing and the attacking enemy as he could. That this direction happened to be into the trackless swamp he did not consider at the time. Survive, his shivering little ego screamed, and he ran on.
Running became difficult when the ground turned to mud, and even more difficult when the mud gave way to open water. After paddling desperately for an interminable length of time Bill came to more mud. The first hysteria had now passed, the firing was only a dull rumble in the distance, and he was exhausted. He dropped onto the mudbank and instantly sharp teeth sank deep into his buttocks. Screaming hoarsely, he ran on until he ran into a tree. He wasn’t going fast enough to hurt himself, and the feel of rough bark under his fingers brought out all of his eoanthropic survival instincts: he climbed. High up there were two branches that forked out from the trunk, and be wedged himself into the crotch, back to the solid wood and gun pointed straight ahead and ready. Nothing bothered him now. The night sounds grew dim and distant, the’ blackness was complete, and within a few minutes his head started to nod. He dragged it back up a few times, blinked about at nothing, then finally slept.
It was the first gray light of dawn, when he opened his gummy eyes and blinked around. There was a little lizard perched on a nearby branch watching him with jewellike eyes.
“Gee-you were really sacked out,” the Chinger said.
Bill’s shot tore a smoking scar in the top of the branch, then the Chinger swung back up from underneath and meticulously wiped bits of ash from his paws.
“Easy on the trigger, Bill,” it said. “Gee-I could have killed you anytime during the night if I had wanted to.”
“I know you,” Bill said hoarsely. “You’re Eager Beager, aren’t you?”
“Gee-this is just like old home week, isn’t it?” A centipede was scuttling by, and Eager Beager the Chinger grabbed it up with three of his arms and began pulling off legs with his fourth and eating them. “I recognized you Bill, and wanted to talk to you. I have been feeling bad ever since I called you a stoolie, that wasn’t right of me. You were only doing your duty when you turned me in. You wouldn’t like to tell me how you recognized me, would you … ?” he asked, and winked slyly.
“Why don’t you bowb off, Jack?” Bill growled, and groped in his pocket for a bottle of cough syrup. Eager Chinger sighed.
“Well, I suppose I can’t expect you to betray anything of military importance, but I hope you will answer a few questions for me.” He discarded the delimbed corpse and groped about in his marsupial pouch and produced a tablet and tiny writing instrument. “You must realize that spying is not my chosen occupation, but rather I was dragooned into it through my speciality, which is exopology-perhaps you have heard of this discipline … ?”