“Look,” Cortez said, “this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing’s dangerous, then we’ve gotta move on; we don’t have all-”
“They aren’t dangerous,” Rogers began. “They don’t-”
“Medic! DOC!” Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Doc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.
“What’s wrong?” He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run.
“It’s Ho. She’s out.”
Doc swung open the door on Ho’s biomedical monitor. He didn’t have to look far. “She’s dead.”
“Dead?” Cortez said. “What the hell-”
“Just a minute.” Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. “Everybody’s biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I’m running it backwards, should be able to-there!”
“What?”
“Four and a half minutes ago-must have been when you opened fire-Jesus!”
“Well?”
“Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No. . .” He watched the dials. “No. . . warning, no indication of anything out of the ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances. . . nothing to. . . indicate-” He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.”
“Oh fuck,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.”
“That’s right,” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”
“I. . . I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,” Lucky said.
Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine-sensitive. The others didn’t know.
“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these. . . monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”
“Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.
“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”
“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.
“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”
After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.
13
We stopped for the “night”-actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours-atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I bad 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 had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, 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.”
“OK, 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 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 very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try