universe.”
“Who’s Chuck Jones?” asked Jerry.
“Who’s Erwin Schr”dinger?” asked Danny.
Halfway to the hills Mick and Karin met a ruined army.
They smelled it before they saw it. The stink of burning rubber and
insulation, of overheated metal and cordite. Of dust churned up in the
heat of battle.
But there was no sound of combat. No artillery, no engines. Not even the
shouts of men. Cautiously, Karin and Mick eased to the top of a rise and
peered over it.
The panorama was so big and so torn up it was hard to tell what had
happened here. Gilligan thought of the pictures he had seen of the
destruction at Mitla Pass in the Sinai during the Six-Day War. But this
was worse than any of those pictures. It seemed that the destroyed
equipment spread over the plain for miles in front of them.
His first instinct was to go around, even if it meant walking for miles.
But there was no hint of movement anywhere on that enormous battlefield,
no contrails in the sky. Except for the occasional crackle of flame and
the whistle of the wind there was nothing.
“Well?” Karin asked.
“I say go across. It’s risky, but we’re low on water. Besides, we’ll be
harder to spot out among all that junk than we would be out on the plain.”
The dragon rider nodded and went back to get her mount.
It took hours to cross the battlefield.
They walked past a line of what looked like self-propelled guns-if
self-propelled guns had barrels made of glass that would droop and melt
under the effects of enemy weapons.
Here a half-dozen tanks in various stages of destruction confronted the
remains of a fifty-foot-tall robot they had pulled down like wolves on an
elk. Further on were the remains of a missile battery caught on the march
and burned while trying to deploy.
But there were no bodies. The wind brought the smell of burnt vehicles but
not a trace of the sweetish stink of burning flesh. Not even the carrion
birds seemed interested in this plain of dead machines.
“Mick,” Karin asked at last, “why do they do this? Do our enemies fight
among themselves?”
“I think it’s more likely they’re just conducting live ammo practices.”
“But they are killing their own creations!”
“These things weren’t ever alive. They’re machines, like my F-15, not
living beings like Stigi. I doubt a single living creature lost its life
here.”
“Still, there is something . . . obscene about all this.”
Gilligan shrugged. “For us, war is a material-intense business. You go
through a lot of equipment.”
But looking over the carnage, Mick tended to agree with her. Even if these
things weren’t alive, it had taken ingenuity to design them and time and
resources to build them. He had been taught that in a war you expended
your equipment wholesale in an effort to win. If you struck hard and fast
with overwhelming strength you minimized casualties, or so the reasoning
went.
Gilligan had always accepted it unthinkingly. Now, wandering among acres
of scorched and twisted ruins, he began to appreciate what that meant.
Besides, he thought, this wasn’t a battle. This was an exercise, a test.
You don’t need to wreck all this just to test it.
“Mick?” Karin said after they had trudged on in silence for several
minutes more. “The people who do this, why do they do it? Why like this?”
“I don’t know,” Mick told her sadly. “I don’t understand their thinking at
all.”
Thirty-eight: TRAP
Wiz Zumwalt sat on a rock under a spreading tree and savored the
experience. It was cool and pleasant here. The late afternoon sun did not
quite reach down through the leaves and the forest around him was alive
with birdsong and the skitterings of squirrels and other little animals.
Wiz wondered what season it was. It looked like late summer, but the
Bubble World didn’t seem to have seasons. How can a world shaped like a
burrito have seasons? he wondered.
For once the pressure was off. The visualization program was running well,
Lannach was keeping the gremlins under control and everything else he
could think of to do was done. So he had slipped out of the Mousehole for