Part 2

Presently the officer stood up. "Men. The Redbirds will follow up this bombardment with a winged attack. They always do when the moons are right. We'll remain hidden along the trail and take them as they come in. They've never learned the strategy of ambush. Make ready for the attack. Be alert!"

* * * * *

Danton motioned and the three of them retreated slowly, as silently as possible. They had crawled probably a hundred yards when the attack came.

The Redbirds were red. They also might be considered birds, with a reptilian dominance. Their wingspread was enormous, and their bodies were very nearly human to look at--with an alien deviation that made them seem grotesque when they really weren't grotesque at all. In a way they were beautiful. Red feathers and gold-flecked eyes.

And then the air was torn apart. Explosions, rushing bodies, breaking wings, burning feathers and singeing flesh and hissing screams. The moonlight fluttered with winged shadows.

"This is real war," Danton heard Van Ness yell. "Hand to hand. The real thing."

Danton couldn't see either Van Ness or Keith. He fought, firing wildly at shadows and substance. The real thing. It was strange, he thought, but in that fifty years of the bloodiest war, the most destructive in history--he'd never killed anything hand to hand. It had been coldly impersonal, that war. A million here, a million there. Nine million at once. And nothing remaining except charred craters. No bodies around. No one crying either. Nothing at all. But this--

Van Ness's fading scream chopped down like hot steel. Danton couldn't fire, afraid of burning Van Ness, who was being lifted up by a Redbird. Van Ness was gone almost before Danton realized that he was being carried up and away over the tree tops.

Danton crawled around in the flame-blasted clearing. His rifle was gone. The Redbird's powerful wings had slammed it into shadows and brush. He looked for Keith.

Keith!

He didn't find Keith either.

He lay still, very still. Several soldiers were poking around in the tangled debris of bodies and blood and torn brush. It was so still all at once. No sounds at all except the hard breathing of men. No wings threshing, or screams penetrating.

Danton played dead. He was surprised at how easy it was.

He recognized the officer's voice. "Load everything that looks human in a couple of amtracs and drag them to the disposal mart."

"Yes, sir."

Motors idling. Men lifting and grunting and cursing. Danton opened his eyes just a little, stared upward into the broad river of sky far up between the mountains:

"How many casualties?"

"Not bad. We lost a quarter maybe. We probably burned down a thousand Redbirds."

"Where do they all come from? We'll never kill them all. They keep coming and they'll always keep coming."

"They're supposed to come from across the white desert. We'll never find out. Anyone striking out across that desert never comes back."

The officer. "On the double, men!"

"Why does it go on?"

"Who knows?"

"Will we win?"

"No one can win. The Redbirds will keep coming. We keep killing!"

"The Powers are happy though. Fifty bodies to the marts. Counting yesterday's casualties, that's over three hundred to the marts since this battle started."

"And how many since the war started?"

"Who knows? When wasn't there a war, pal? What the hell would a guy do around here if there wasn't a war on?"

Danton felt hands on his ankles and wrists. He forced limpness down his body and felt himself tossed among the dead. He was hardly noticed at all, dead or otherwise. His uniform was torn, covered with blood and dirt until it looked like any other uniform. He must look pretty bad to be taken for dead.

Swarms of insects, drawn by the blood, settled in clouds. The amtrac jerked forward. Danton saw the drivers sitting up there like gray plaster figurines. One of the men started to mumble a song, a kind of chant, more like a dirge.

"Shut up! You'll get us shot!"

"Borkan's back there. He can't hear."

Danton listened. His stomach went hollow and icy at the song. It was old. It was full of ghosts, ghost treads, and ghost shadows marching out of the past, out of the present.

"The men of the tattered battalion, which fights 'till it stumbles and dies, Dazed with the scream of the battle, the din and damned glare and the cries, The men with the broken heads backward, and the blood running out of their eyes!"

"Shut up!"

"The Powers have all of the music, the glory and color and gold; Ours be a handful of ashes, a bountiful mouthful of mould."

"Shut up, I tell you! We'll be shot! If you--"

"Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold--"

The song faded slowly, died out. It seemed to die of weariness, to run down. And Danton kept on hearing it--circling mournfully through his head like swirling muddy water round a stake.

One thing he was seeing now, graphically so that he would never forget: Wars weren't all the same. Sometimes fighting-men hated war. He had known only the swift clean war, the septic war, a gigantic street-cleaning machine with a ray gun in front and a rotary brush in the back, with individuals turned abruptly into the earth from which they had come, and no one knowing the difference.

But in different times and places, wars could be different.

* * * * *

The amtrac stopped. "Let's get 'em out of here!"

Danton was thrown up, over, out and down, and other forms fell around him. He heard a moan from something not quite dead. Metal clanged. Machinery whirred. He thought of the mart, disposal mart. He thought of dropping through a hole maybe into a pit of fire, or into a vat of something. All through him as from an intravenous injection--horror.

He looked. A mound of metal, as though a bald giant had been buried up to his eyebrows. Metal corroded with green slime. And there, an opening appearing as heavy metal doors slid open. A railcar with a spherical truck bed emerging from the opening and waiting with an eery suggestion of eager sentience in its cold metal.

The men throwing the bodies into the railcar.

"What happens to them?"

"Who knows? No one ever hears of them again. Morlan mentioned it the other day. He said the Powers demand sacrifice, like gods maybe. I'm not superstitious or anything, but--"

"Why not? Something's taking care of us, making us move around, dance on the invisible wires. Maybe the Powers are gods. Why not? They're supposed to live forever. Never grow old."

"Push the button! Push it! Get them out of here. Wait, here's another one."

Danton felt himself plunging, striking, rolling among the other dead logs. He didn't move. Some of the horror was dissolving, because this whole disposal system was too elaborate. There was something basic and symptomatic about it, and Danton felt that it was a key. Van Ness and Keith were gone. He couldn't think about them now. Their disappearance had seemed so very final. He was alone. He still had his duty, and he was curious. He wanted to find out what he could, although the idea of somehow getting a ship and returning to Earth with what information he could garner was no longer part of his thoughts. You could take advantage of the impossible if it happened perhaps. You couldn't anticipate it as a basis for action.

But he was still curious, and that was part of his duty. The Oligarchs, the Powers, seemed interested in gathering in the blossoms of death from the fields. Very interested. One of these soldiers had said the Powers would be happy. Surely then the bodies wouldn't simply go into a vat or a flame.

"Here she goes!"

Darkness. Silent movement whirring, rapidly accelerating speed, hot wind sighing dry past his face. The body of the dead girl, her body tight up against him in the darkness, moved a little. She sighed brokenly.

Danton felt around, found the belt, holster, ancient revolver he had spotted earlier. He removed it, buckled it around his own waist. He was careful not to raise his head. Above him, close, he felt a ceiling rushing back.

Feeling the girl beside him, the girl soldier, still alive somehow, he thought of Mara who had found him unbearable because he still had the mind of a soldier and had refused to be reconditioned. She had grown to hate him--no, not hate, revulsion. It was natural. She had been reconditioned to hate anything suggesting violence.

Well, that was long ago and far away. Further away than long ago.

The car slowed, tilted. Doors slid open and a soft blue radiance filtered through. Danton clung to the metal and stared down a gleaming metal chute. He began to hear incoherent sounds coming out of his own throat, uncontrollably, as the car tilted further. He grabbed desperately, hung on as the car dumped its load into the chute, down, down into a giant pit. The pit was surrounded with high mesh walls and a steel rail. And behind the rail a circular walkway, with panels, or doors, spaced at regular intervals. Maybe a hundred or more doors.

And cranes, cranes lifting metal mouths full of the squirming mass in the pit, lifting them to the railing and onto moving belts that carried them through the walls and out of sight.

To what? _God, to what?_ Danton thought.

* * * * *

Danton clung frantically to the empty car. Sweat made a stream down his chest, though the pit was refrigerated. Cold. The metal was frosted, it shone like ice. And in the pit some of the bodies moved and made sounds. The girl soldier. She got to her knees.

Danton tried to crawl back, back up the slippery metal of the railcar. He sought darkness back there, a place to hide. Then he stopped trying and felt his fingers loosening as he watched the girl. Her face was unrecognizable behind a mask of blood and dirt. But she was standing up now. She raised one hand. She looked up at the many expressionless doors.

The strength with which she forced the keening death-song from her body was not the strength of her body. It came from someplace else. From outside, from memory, from a last defiance that could no longer suffer punishment, from the buried ghosts of thousands of years that had died.

"You sing of the great clean guns, that belch forth death at will. Oh, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!"

Danton's hands let go, and he slid down the chute.

"... sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry before. Oh, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more."

He scarcely felt the bodies under him. He looked at the woman singing and he listened.

"... sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and hew, Will you sing of maimed ones, too, who die and die anew?"

Danton stumbled. He reached her side.

"Sing of feted generals who bring the victory home. Oh ... but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!"

Danton touched her shoulder. Her uniform hung in tatters. A line of red ran down her torn arm. She sank to her knees. He could barely hear the last two lines of her song.

"... sing of hearts triumphant, long ranks of marching men. And will you sing of the shadowy hosts that never march again?"

He lifted her and stood, holding her like a child. Now her eyes were closed. She would have a pretty face, he thought. The army uniform cap fell away and her hair tumbled down over his hand and arm like red dust. Her lips moved. She whispered: "No one hears. No one--ever hears."

"I hear you," Danton said.

But you don't hear me, he thought. Her body was limp. She's dead, he thought.

The crane dipped, steel jaws champing, steel-thewed neck stiff and superior, now lifting.

Danton put the girl down, leaped, caught the metal lips, clung as the crane lifted, swung, caught the rail, pulled himself over onto the walkway. His breath was hot and his lungs burned.

He slid the ancient revolver free and examined it quickly. Its mechanism was simple enough. He twirled the cylinder, removed the safety catch. Doors? Where did they go? None of the doors seemed inclined to tell him; nothing moved around him except the crane and the conveyor belt.

He walked round the circular way once, came back. It would seem that he must crawl onto the belt to escape the pit. That would take him--somewhere. It seemed that he was destined to follow the dead wherever the dead went in this place where the dead seemed to have lost the last faint tinge of dignity or honor.

Silently, simultaneously, the doors slid open. A man was born from the darkness of each black rectangle. Bronze giant men in tunics that glittered like finely-woven metallic-silk. There was some variation, yet they were amazingly alike, expressionless, cold, removed. Far removed.

Danton heard the conveyor belt moving softly, swiftly behind him, carrying its macabre load. The revolver felt heavy in his hand. Then, from somewhere, a voice crackled in the pit like ice shifting.

"Bring this soldier to the Council Room."

A man's voice, without any particular characteristic other than one of detachment. It might have been the voice of a machine, or something on a tape.

Danton fired seven times. After that he stopped because the gun was empty of cartridges. Each time he fired, a man fell soundlessly, without dramatics, calmly. Each time, the man next in line stepped forward to receive the next bullet. After the last bullet was gone, three other men lifted the fallen bodies and placed them on the conveyor belt. Five others surrounded Danton. They did not touch him. If the episode had had any emotional significance at all for these men, Danton hadn't seen it. Further resistance was futile; the firing of the revolver had been only token defiance anyway.

Danton felt the refrigerated air of the pit clinging to him as the men marched him down a long tubular hall walled in dull metal.

* * * * *

The room was large, metal-vaulted, brittle. Mesh grid screens surrounded him at a distance, and the useless revolver hung cold and damp in his hands. Three men and three women sat behind a half-moon of bright silver suspended from the high ceiling by shimmering strands of silver, like very fine wire.

As architecture, the things he had seen were the final stage in constructivism. An elimination of the sense of weight and solidity of traditional forms. Everywhere were space constructions of metal sheets, glass, plastic, beams of angular light, some vaguely related to human figures, largely as abstracts of geometrical shapes, technological forms.

Environment and people were each a balanced projection of the other. The general effect was one of machine-like precision, brittle coldness in which man and machine had reached emotionless synthesis.

One of the men said, "Rhone, will you question this?"

The woman's voice was musical, but without warmth, like a nicely constructed music-box. "What is your name?"

He did not answer.

"You should answer, soldier. Voluntarily. I can assure you that we have ways to force your mind to give up all of its secrets."

She waited. He did not answer.

"Your actions have been peculiar, soldier. We are interested."

Danton thought fast. They had spaceships. Three of them he had seen, the three they no longer had, thanks to Keith. If he admitted being from Earth it would certainly incite immediate reprisal, and Seers wasn't ready. He wouldn't be ready for a long time. He would never be ready to receive an attack from Mars. His idea was to send a secret force to attack Mars, so that the New World populace would never know about it.

A well-planned series of lies, elaborate, complex, provoking. Find out facts. Try to postpone or avert any immediate attack on Earth. Reduce things to as individual a level as possible. He had one advantage: from his observations to this point, the Oligarch culture seemed not to have changed its basic pattern. Evolution had merely moved that pattern forward a hundred years, solidified its static essence. Cold efficiency, egomania, class superiority--the system supported by scientific method and a fanatical, one-track dogma based on paranoia.

He had fought this force a long time. He thought he understood it.

"Your name, soldier. Your unit and rank."

"Danton West," he said. He remembered the line-officer's words, a quick frame of reference. "Captain. Second Army. That was a while back. More lately of the Revolutionary Forces."

"Revolutionary--"

Danton saw their expressions alter, almost imperceptibly, but alter they did under the masks. When that fifty-years war had ended, none of the central ruling clique, the Oligarch Council, had been found. And one thing seemed incredible to Danton as he stood there:

These three men and women seemed to be the same individuals who had made up that Oligarch Council on Earth a hundred years before.

That was logical enough. Except--

They hadn't aged at all. There had been no sign of change.

That soldier back there had said, "... _They're supposed to live forever. They never grow old._"

"That is impossible, of course," the woman Rhone said. "Now--explain your uniform. It is unorthodox. In fact it is a duplication of the uniforms worn by officers of a certain army of another time and place of which you should know nothing. Can you explain this?"

"I can and will. We do know about those certain armies in another time and place. A hundred years ago. Earth. You think we have forgotten?"

* * * * *

Silence. The woman's eyes widened, only slightly, though a tremendous inner emotional surge was obvious. One of the men leaned forward. Danton was relieved. He felt a bit more secure, seeing even this slight degree of individuality and emotion. There was the psychological effect, he knew, of feeling a subtle lessening of the unification of forces against him.

They hadn't aged, he thought. The same ones, without grayness, without wrinkles, without any sign of physical degeneration.

The woman said, not to him, voicing her thoughts, "Impossible. No one beyond the Walls can possibly know of the past. We took great pains to assure that--Mars is the only world they have ever known, the only world that ever was. Our world."

"We know," Danton said. "Others know too. The Revolutionists know. I'm telling you this much because nothing you can do can stop it. It's developed too far. Revolt. Did you think it would ever be stamped out?"

Beneath the masks, Danton could see concern, incredulous concern. Maybe they had thought they had set up an impervious regime. And maybe they actually had. But there was doubt here. Just enough of a doubt to play upon. One thing he knew, and that was that there was resentment out there beyond the Walls, whatever the Walls were, and those songs, hopeless as they were, had been songs of revolt against oppression. The germ was out there....

"You have a choice," the woman said. "Tell us everything you know. That, or suffer the kind of pain we cannot describe to you, a kind you will find out for yourself."

He could imagine. The Oligarchs had been efficient at everything. That had been their god--efficiency, mastery of the machines, the maintenance forever of the master-elite over the rabble.

Like an amoeba, the social forces of the world had split, the old values solidifying, the new values pulling away, coming back again, overrunning, defeating. But the Oligarchs had fled and here they had developed their particular systems to some final state.

Whatever they had waiting for him, to open his mind, it would be efficient.

She said, "You entered our Walls voluntarily. Why?"

She said it as though it were totally inconceivable that anyone beyond the Walls should seek to enter voluntarily. Maybe it was inconceivable.

"Curiosity," Danton said. He managed to smile at each of them in turn. "There have been so many rumors growing old, becoming legends and myths. I came in to find out for myself."

"You do not expect to escape?"

Danton shrugged. "I don't care one way or the other. I had hoped to remain here." He waited. He thought. Finally he added, "I had hoped to become one of you."

"What?" one of the men said in a whisper.

The man on Rhone's right said, "A curious type. Obviously he has insight. One might almost think--"

The woman said, "We can speculate later, if we have to, Weisser. Right now we are interested in facts. Facts!"

She kept looking into Danton's eyes. Her own eyes had a curious green quality. She was beautiful, of course, physically. No one had ever denied the physical beauty of the Oligarchs. Hereditary physical beauty was important to them. They developed it by selective breeding and--no one had figured out by what other means.

There was the indication of an edge to the woman's voice now. "Three of our ships vanished. Do you know anything about those ships, soldier?"

Danton smiled. "Yes," he said, and paused for perhaps five seconds. "We destroyed them."

The silence then was longer than five seconds. It was very long. It lengthened until it was painfully heavy. The woman's voice was a whisper. "How could the rabble do that? It isn't true, of course. It couldn't be true."

"You'll never find the ships," Danton said. "There aren't any ships now. We blew them to pieces. Our scientists did it. I don't know where the scientists and their secret laboratories are. I don't know too much about the inner workings of the revolt. But I know some things you might find very valuable."

"But, Weisser, it is impossible, isn't it?"

"Of course. The man is obviously lying. They couldn't possibly have evolved any such weapon. They couldn't even have developed the concept of revolt. Their cultural patterns, their attitudes and hereditary capabilities are set. They can't change."

"Then how do we classify this soldier?"

"Why bother? Some sort of crazy deviant. We put him under the Scanners now, then dispose of him. His body has some value."

The woman said, "There still remains the question of what happened to our ships."

Danton thought: the Oligarch Council operates on a strictly top-down principle. Who is the extreme top? The woman, Rhone? Or the man, Weisser? One of them certainly. That might be important to know.

Danton dipped into the small supply packet at his waist, lifted a food-capsule to his mouth. He looked first at Weisser, then at the woman. "I can tell you a lot. And if you don't find out what is happening out there very soon, you'll be destroyed. Like those ships. I'll bargain with you. Let me remain here, enjoy certain privileges I've thought about often when I was crawling around out there in the mud. Show me what you have here, let me understand. For that, I'll give you valuable information you need to survive."

Weisser said coldly, "_We_--bargain with a mongrel?"

"This capsule is poison, and it isn't partial to blue-blood," Danton said easily. "A few seconds after putting it into my mouth, I'll be dead. I'll be silent then. I can tell you how the ships were destroyed, the weapons used, some things about the planned revolt. If I don't tell you, you'll never find out. And if you don't find out what is happening out there in a short time, it will be too late--for you."

The woman pointed. "Take that door out, soldier. Perhaps you'll be contacted later."

Danton smiled. "Don't wait too long. You don't have much time, beautiful."

* * * * *

A corridor led into a circular room, one section paneled entirely in glass. Furnishings were suspended at odd angles, the concepts of an odd structural art, from various lengths of silver strands. He stood there, then tried the door. He couldn't open it. He was locked in. He felt eyes on him.