Thomas N. Scortia

THE ARMAGEDDON TAPES

—TAPE II

UNTIL this moment human institutions such as the well-named “Holy State” represented the closest human approach to group consciousness. Yet, there was a deeper racial consciousness that could find expression only in the final melding of two great races, the human and the Angae. These insectlike creatures shared in a unique racial immortality that might never have become part of the total human experience had not the Angae encountered the Children of Men by the merest coincidence. For mankind then, only a focal point, a Messiah was needed and in the outcast Martin, there arose a power and force that spelled the end of the racial uniqueness of the Angae and of humans and eventually the only force that could meet the enveloping destructiveness of the Theos that had now invested the whole of the neighboring galaxy. . . .

Die Anelan de Galactea-Vol. II, Ca. 4300

“Second Battalion ... we are in position now.”

“Air assault . . . ETA ten seconds . . . The yellow jump light has been. ...”

“Mobiles two and three . . . We see them below. The men of the village are gathered in the square. Many of them are in their old ceremonial costumes. They stand, impassive waiting ... I see the children now. There are six of them. I can identify the one called Martin through the periscope. He’s taller and seems in command. He is. . . .”

“What are they doing?”

“Attack, attack, attack. ...”

“Oh, God. . . .”

“It’s too much to. . . .”

(Cut the tape. There’s nothing beyond this point, only a mass of confused signals. We’re still not sure of what happened in Cherokee, only that we have lost all contact with our forces and the mission seems to have failed utterly.)

(How can that be, Inquisitor Jarvis? They were only a handful and our men are as completely loyal and disciplined as have ever appeared on the face of the earth.)

(It had happened. Make no mistake of that. These proceedings are to be considered top secret. You are the only civilian who knows of this debacle. Naturally, the citizens of our Holy State must not know. You will forget it when you leave this room.)

(But there must be an accounting. No citizen may be interrogated or erased without an accounting.)

(Don’t be a fool. This is an emergency. All special rights of the citizen are suspended, especially the rights of these renegades. Citizen Clawson, you have examined the outcast?)

(John Talltrees? Barbarous name.)

(The Indians love their native names. No matter, the Holy State has indulged them and preserved their race for reasons known to it. I suppose its motive as much as anything is to define their special biochemical immunity to the Mettler serum that has given us the final world-wide peace for which the human race has longed.)

(They represent the focal point of a contamination. I would have eliminated them long ago.)

(You question the decision?)

(No, Inquisitor Jarvis. No, of course not.)

(Then tell me about this John Talltrees. You have had him for five days. In what fashion has his biochemistry changed? I gather from your preliminary reports that it has.)

(It’s somewhat difficult to define. There are metabolites in the urine, for instance, that are normally associated with paranoid schizophrenia. The acetylcholine esterase of the nervous system has been subtly modified so that the catalytic rate is much enhanced.)

(This means nothing to me.)

(It means that the impulses in his nervous system travel at several times normal speed. His physical reactions are appropriately speeded up as well as his heartbeat and certain parts of his metabolism, most notably his ability to mobilize blood glucose from stored glycogen.)

(And the end result of this is. . . .)

(A remarkably improved human being. He thinks faster, acts faster, and mobilizes greater stress reserves than are available to the normal human being. With all this, he has developed a peculiar psychological dichotomy.)

(Psychological dichotomy?)

(He believes he is two personalities inhabiting a single human body. He does not find this abnormal or alarming or in any way disconcerting. He holds that these will eventually merge and further merge with others. What others, I cannot understand from his interrogation.)

(You’ve dared to interrogate him without an inquisitor present? You tread on a very dangerous group, Citizen.)

(A purely clinical interrogation, Inquisitor. I recognize that this case is your special interest. I have attempted no deep probe, only what is necessary to elicit a complete case history for your inspection.)

(Very well. This is not for me to decide in any event. Whoever finally disposes of this case will have these tapes for his decision.)

(These tapes?)

(This one and the one with the boy Martin. You are not aware of that one and, unless it seems advisable, you will not be allowed to hear it. I may in due course give you some major information from the tape, however, if it seems useful to your purpose.)

(I want no information of this sort. I’m a citizen, loyal to the State and its avatar, the Premier Annointed. I have every reason to believe he will fill his allotted life span.)

(This is for me to decide, Citizen. Do you question that?)

(State, no.)

(Very well, have your people bring in the subject. We will proceed with the interrogation proper.)

(I will of course leave.)

(Not at all. In such a situation, I will need you as a witness.)

(The tape should be sufficient. Please, the tape should be sufficient. I have no desire. . . .)

(Your desire is to serve the Holy State and at the moment I have the power to decide how the State is served.)

(Very well, I will give the signal.)

(Noise in the background, sound of rolling wheels. Mumbled conversation and the whisper of a door closing.)

(Is he conscious?)

(Yes, Inquisitor.)

(Will you recite the ritual introduction?)

(I would have thought that was a privilege you reserved for yourself.)

(The Holy State looks to all of its citizens as priests of the new scheme.)

(Very well . . . mumble, mumble ... the Holy Fight of the citizen as a unit of the vast State . . . mumble . . , conceived in the light of the true liberty that is the surrender of self . . . mumble. . . most Exalted Plurality, the Premier Anointed . . .)

(You have no feeling for the words. No matter, there is little doubt that you believe them. Mettler gave us the greatest and most effective tool to assure the continuity of the ecclesiastic reverence in the individual.)

(Shall we begin? Yes? Very well, what is your name?)

My name is John Talltrees and my name is Martin.

(Of course, of course, but which am I addressing?)

For the moment I, John Talltrees, will talk for us. Martin is of the opinion that you cannot fully understand his psychology, which is, after all, alien to your mind. It is a matter of having spent too much time with Them.

(The insect creatures that we destroyed in the spaceship? Was he truly a part of them?)

Body, soul, mind. A complete blending of consciousness, which is why he still holds a deep affection for them even though he now realizes that his species must destroy them or ... at least absorb them.

(John, what happened in Cherokee? We know that the ship landed or was forced down and that for a long time, the children were among you. We know that the aliens were somehow cast into a kind of trance that was apparently the doing of the children. We know that the children in some fashion entered your society and changed you, but the motives ... the details, the reasons? . . .)

(Your questions are not phrased precisely enough, Citizen.)

(Your indulgence, Inquisitor, I will pursue this in a fashion that will give us the information we want.)

I am John Talltrees. I have lived in the village of Cherokee in the Great Smokies all of my life, long before you people assembled all the disparate tribes of the land and brought them to our land. I grew up in the gentle hills with their wealth of pine that you have despoiled, the thriving kudzu that would cover whole hills in a summer.

(Kudzu, isn’t that a Japanese vine?)

(It is, Inquisitor, introduced in the fifties as a soil stabilizer by the highway builders of the Republican period. It has come to contaminate the area.)

We lived as brothers in the village. Although our numbers had been sadly reduced by the tender angels of the Holy State, there were enough of us to form a viable society and the State for the most part left us alone after it had sequestered us. How were we to know that our sin was one over which we had no control, that we were immune to the nucleic-acid serum that had finally brought peace and conformity to the world, that had brought this antlike dependence upon the State?

(The greatest invention for peace and human dignity, he speaks of it in such a contemptuous manner.)

(Remember, Inquisitor, these are the outcasts. It was for this original sin that they were expelled from our society.)

Oh, like all humans we longed for that special feeling of identity with a larger group. In our case, the identity was the tribe and later the village. We understood your need for it was our need. You, on the other hand, rejected us because we could not fulfill the need in your specific fashion.

(He does not sound like John Talltrees now.)

(It is the other personality intruding.)

(Disgusting.)

When the ship came from the sky, we thought that it was another of your war machines, sent to exterminate us. We knew that you would eventually have to make this particular decision. We were a pocket of infection that could not forever be tolerated. When the ship plunged from the sky and fell onto the mountainside, we ran to the hill spots we had prepared. Many of our people were caught in the valleys and a few were within the area where the ship landed and were never heard from again. It was, we think, the radiation from the ship’s engines.

When we finally approached the ship, we found that it was wounded and that there were humans inside. They were children and they came from the ship and greeted us. There were also other things in the ship, great insectlike creatures, but these were either dead or in a deep stupor. The children were very strange . . . filthy and half-blinded by the day’s light . . . told us that they had put the aliens to sleep, that some of the aliens had inadvertently been killed. The children stood among themselves and sorrowed over the ones they had killed because they did not want to take life needlessly. They felt all life substance should be conserved for the group and the lost aliens would not be salvaged for the group. One of the children was dead and this one they ate.

(Ugh, Holy Writ, is it true that they were cannibals, Inquisitor?)

(The earlier tape in which the one Martin was interrogated suggested the aliens were. Apparently the children were good students, far too good.)

They explained that this was not a mere ritual, that the aliens had changed them in such a way that they could preserve the essence of each individual by consuming him, that the personality continued as a live thing within the one who had consumed him. It was the most complete kind of personal immortality.

(State, State, can it be? It’s what we have always striven for, but can it be?)

(Citizen, you astonish me. This is completely outside of doctrine. Utter political blasphemy. Personal immortality lies only in the continuity of the Holy State.)

(Still, it would make some sense. We know that the personality is an incredibly complex coda, impressed on DNA molecules. If these could be ingested intact and preserved, passed from generation to generation, there would be no true death.)

(It is against all State teachings. Have a care that you don’t find yourself in our Chambers of Love.)

(No, no, I don’t consider it seriously. I am completely doctrinaire. How could I be otherwise?)

(Of course, Citizen. Of course.)

We took them into our village and tended their wounds and fed them. It was strange. They could not at first eat our food but preferred a sort of reed mash with which we fed our cattle. The one named Martin . . . although it is difficult to decide which of the five children is Martin . . . brought them together and they stood for an hour in silent communion in the square. After that, they could eat our fare. Martin told me that they had changed themselves. In due course, he promised me that they would change us and I found this frightening. I told him that he should not do this but he brushed it aside, saying that they had in the long days and nights of the ship conceived that their existence was not accidental, that they had a special mission for the race from which they sprang.

(This is the crux of the investigation, Citizen. This paranoid delusion of a special mission. Martin spoke of it in the earlier interrogation.)

(Did the interrogator understand what he meant?)

(Alas, he is no longer available for questioning. He had to be sent to the Blessed Fields. He was hopelessly insane.)

(Peace and joy to his soul, Inquisitor.)

(To be sure. John Talltrees, what happened in the village?)

You know what happened initially. Your stations had traced the ship to our village, but for a long time you were content to watch and wait for any overt move. When this did not come, you grew restive and fearful, just as Martin predicted you would. Your fear was too great to be contained and he reached out and stimulated it.

(You imply that he could in some fashion control us?)

The aliens had changed Martin and his companions in many ways, biochemically and physically. What they did not know was that Martin and his companions had been brought by their parents to a remote spot in Canada because they were different, because they would have been exterminated by your Holy State before they could reach maturity, had the State known of them. Because of this special ability of theirs, they were able to identify more closely with the aliens that captured them and their parents than any normal child. They became essentially generators of food for the aliens much as an aphid generates food for ants, and in the process they became a part of the group mind of the aliens. Through that link, they learned to see the universe as the aliens did, to detect the fine structure of physical phenomena in a fashion our gross senses cannot. To detect is to know, to know is to understand, to understand is to manipulate.

(You see, Citizen, it is as we thought. These creatures pose a deadly threat to our Holy State. And to you, John Talltrees. You should have killed them immediately.)

I could not.

(Why not?)

We were friends.

(Friends with filth?)

Friends and a part of them. We took them into our village and Martin and I found that, in spite of his utterly alien way of thinking, that we could somehow communicate on an emotional level. You must understand that, for all of his unusual life and his remarkable talents, he was still little more than a child. Physically about seventeen, he seemed younger and more naive than this in many ways. At first, he even had trouble coordinating his muscles and would often stumble on the road or reach for a glass of water and overshoot it by as much as four inches.

We did not, at the time, recognize the five children for what they were. We saw a startling unity among them, an ability at times almost to merge into a single personality. We found their quiet assurance that they carried some special message for humanity disconcerting. This . . . what Sarah Running Brook called “messianic conviction” . . . was unshakable, a sense of almost holy conviction. Of course, living as outcasts in your Holy State, we were quite familiar with this form of paranoia and made allowances for it.

(Inquisitor, dare we let him go on? To insult the State? Surely, he becomes a candidate for the Fields.)

(Enough of that. The State will dispose of him in due course. For the moment he is valuable to us.)

I took Martin to me as a second son and taught him in those early days to walk and ride and hunt. We hunt a great deal in the old manner of our fathers and he found this strange and primitively satisfying. The two girls became adept at the looms and wove some marvelous fabrics that brought a high return at the State Store. The strangest thing was that, when one of the children developed a talent, suddenly they all seemed to have it. One day, although by our standards it was not seemly, Martin took over a loom from the small one named Beth and produced a fabric with a wool and warp that seemed to interchange, creating a fabric of suppleness and electric quality. He said that he had altered the electrostatic distribution along the cotton molecule, but we passed it off as another of those inexplicable things that children were constantly saying.

You understand, all this while your people were playing a waiting game, fearful of this great ship that had descended into the Smokies. You were completely unaware that the creatures inside were either dead or had been immobilized by the children. That was something I did not understand until much later Martin and I became . . . well. . . closer. They had lived with the aliens for a long time as their food sources . . . Martin called them “cows,” which was a reasonably good description for the ant-aphid relationship they had . . . and had developed an empathy for the aliens. Martin always referred to them simply as “They” and he spoke of the love that they had developed for these creatures in the dank confines of the ship. Still, the aliens had denied them their birthright, and as they grew to be more powerful than the aliens, they turned against them. They loved them as children loved their parents and they hated them for the restrictions the aliens placed on their natural talents. When the children finally took over the ship and landed it near our village, they threw the aliens into a deep sleep. Some of them did not survive and died on landing. The children felt a perverse joy in this. They were not truly dead, of course, not so long as members of Their race still lived to eat them.

(God, that reference to cannibalism again, Inquisitor.)

(God? Citizen. You forget yourself. Haven’t we of the Holy State spent a good portion of your conditioning demonstrating to you that there is no God, that the State is the sublime summation of all human effort, and that the citizen may lose himself in his fellows? What need do you have for a God?)

(It was a purely automatic response that. . . .)

(Should not have come. Your conditioning leaves something to be desired.)

(No, no, it isn’t true. I was one of the first. My parents volunteered for the serum in the midst of the devastating wars when it seemed that the whole race would die.)

(We shall see. When this is finished. . . .)

(I can only await your benign decision, Inquisitor.)

Martin lacked humanity, if you understand me. He knew as did the others that he had a mission. How it came to him I’m not sure . . . probably from what he had seen in the minds of the aliens . . . but he could see clearly into the probable futures of our race and he knew that he had to guide us in a certain direction, that eventually, for our mutual survival before a greater menace we would have to merge with the aliens from whose ship he had come. “They will resist that with all the elemental fury of a total race,” he said, “but we will prevail in the end.”

I could not understand that since he had assured me that the aliens were not malign, that They sought merely another world, an uninhabited one so that They might again build the culture that had been destroyed in a great disaster in the next Galaxy. They had fled some overwhelming menace that had produced this disaster. A single vast creature, Martin thought.

Yet, although They had no inimical designs on the earth and on our race, Martin knew that They would finally recognize the challenge of the children. He knew that the great ships still waiting beyond the clouds of our world would now not simply go away as They had planned originally. The menace of the children to Their uniqueness as a race and eventually of the human race was too great, the danger to Them too acute. “They will not go,” he told me. “They will come finally, reluctantly, and then we will face the Armageddon that will yield a Galaxy-spanning welding of the two races. There will be other races and we will invest the total universe against the day when Something comes.”

“Something?” I asked.

Martin shivered. “A menace beyond defining, a thing beyond your wildest imaginings of dread and evil.”

I found his wide-eyed horror amusing. He believed in what he said, of course, but I still found it amusing. Why, I don’t know since it became obvious that he and the children had an acuteness of vision not given to ordinary human beings.

(Acuteness of vision? In what fashion? You’ve referred to this before.)

This is a difficult thing for me to understand. As I said, the children had learned from the aliens to see the fine structure of the universe. Where our senses yield a statistical result, a gross summation of minute changes, the children could see on a finer level, determine the subtle interactions of billions of particles, see discretely the tiny forces that made up the larger ones that we detect and deal with. To this end, their senses went beyond the statistical and their manipulation of the environment around them was subtle and complete in a fashion we cannot understand. At least as yet. They played with atoms as an ordinary child plays with dominoes.

(What do you mean, “as yet”?)

Martin has assured me that we will. This is part of his mission. First we must find the several selves we each contain, reconcile them, and then we will be ready for them, for the final step in the long evolution from the cave.

(Do you hear, Inquisitor? This business of finding the several selves within one’s self. Isn’t this what happened to Martin’s interrogator?)

(Perhaps, perhaps. The man thought somehow that there was another in the room with him when he taped the narco-interview. He spent hours speaking with this person and answering. Only there was just one and he could not face that. After his personality degenerated, we of course . . .)

(Of course. . . .)

Although our mountains had been badly despoiled in the past, I was able to take Martin among them and show him something of the joy we had in nature, in the trees and the small things that creep through the brush, and in the hard and glittering rocks that made up our world. I took him among the Cherokees and the remains of the Iroquois and the Sioux and all the other tattered remnants of once-great races that you had herded into this tiny area. From Them he learned much. From us the sense of oneness with nature, from the Iroquois the ancient dream therapy that looks obliquely into a man’s soul—the dream therapy that took your own western scientists centuries to discover long after it was a part of their culture.

We went down into the valley one day, where the streams wind sluggishly through tortuous channels from the mountains. I showed him how to pan the streams and we recovered tiny glints of fire, of garnets and rubies, that in another day would have been priceless. I told him of the time centuries before when a great house called Tiffany’s had mined this area for the precious stones. Now there are only the small fragments in the stream, but their fire and inner nature pleased him. As we talked, he assembled an astonishing mound of the bright stones, none of them over a millimeter in length and then he sat gazing at them.

When I asked him what he was doing, he remarked that he was simply playing. He was still very much a child, you see. He frowned and the mound of stones moved uncertainly, then more certainly and then arose as a cloud of dull red. It formed a man image, then a woman image (for he was beginning to be troubled by this aspect of his humanness), and the shape caught the energy from some source and emitted the purest of reds so that the woman shape was a cloud of brilliant ruby light.

(Humph, laser phenomenon, no doubt. Can he really do this without apparatus?)

(It would seem so, Inquisitor.)

(More likely an excellent example of simple hypnotic positive illusion. I don’t believe in such nonsense as this.)

We grew close, Martin and me. He had a remarkable capacity for friendship, even though he was remarkably naive about the world. He talked endlessly with the elders of all the tribes, absorbing their lore and their knowledge of the outside world. One day he asked me what it meant to be a blood brother.

“It’s an old custom among many of the tribes,” I said.

“I don’t understand its meaning,” he said.

“When two men are friends and feel their destinies are forever entwined, they mingle their blood and become one.”

“This I understand,” he said. For a moment the memories of what had happened earlier in the village troubled me, but he pressed those memories back into the deepest part of my mind as he and the children had done before. It was obvious that we were not ready for the horror that to them was the most ordinary part of their life and their passing on.

“You and I will become blood brothers, John,” he announced that evening.

“I would like that,” I said.

We sat in the light of the lantern in my cabin and each of us gashed our wrists so that the blood flowed freely. Then we crossed the wounds and watched the blood intermingle, vowing eternal friendship in the old manner. I watched his expression and saw a wonder come into his eyes, a sudden realization. At the same time my own mind was suddenly awash with the most conflicting sensations, as though I were simultaneously in a hundred bodies.

“Of course,” he said. “It should have been easy to do it this way all along.”

Before I could stop him, he raised my wounded wrist and began to deepen the wound until the blood spurted forth. I watched with a kind of horror as he did the same to his. We sat, two huddled male figures, while he raised my wrist to his mouth and signalled for me to do the same. I was suddenly frightened and dizzy but I did as he asked. We sat and silently drank each other’s blood.

(The creature is mad. Disgusting. A stink in the nostrils of the Anointed Plurality.)

(Wait, Inquisitor Jarvis. Wait.)

In the end he caused the wounds to close. I do not know how he did this yet, but the knowledge is in my mind. Just as everything else is in my mind. Just as Martin is in my mind and I in his.

(Madness. This is clearly impossible.)

No, no, for as Martin said, no personality, no ego was lost in the ship. But the creatures of the ship needed food and here, except for the cities, food is more plentiful. The transfer is still important, however, and in our ritual Martin found the way that replaced their earlier cannibalism. It was a discovery of vast significance, he informs me.

(When did he tell you that?)

Just this instant.

(Never mind this errant mysticism. Tell us about the last day.)

The last day before your people came to attack the alien ship and take Martin away, we went badger trapping. The badgers had returned to the hills in recent years and often provided a welcome change to our larder. We had once tried to hunt them with dogs, although our lore told us that this was not possible. The razor-clawed animal would roll on its back and rip at the underside of the poor dogs before disappearing into its hole. We lost many fine animals before we learned that they were best trapped.

We set green willow snares, Martin and I, in the old way. The snares were so arranged that, when the animal came to eat the bait, a split green-willow bow was triggered and closed on its leg. Even then this is not the surest way of trapping the beasts for they are fierce and want freedom above all else, preferring even death to capture. We can admire them for that for this is what we would have. Better freedom than the soul-destroying captivity of your Holy State.

(There is no question of it. He is a complete revanchist. Even though we have given our word that the tribes will not be molested, this one is destined for the Fields. Can you imagine such attitudes unleashed among the laity.?)

(They would not understand it, Inquisitor, any more than I do. The complete acceptance of our Holy State is a part of our life, a necessary outgrowth of the serum that had stifled all combativeness in our race.)

(A Combativeness and aggression that brought us once to racial extinction, Citizen.)

(I do not question it. Together we make a whole greater than its parts now. We are one with the State and the State is us without reservation and without flaw.)

(So be it.)

(So be it.)

The badger gnawed its leg off.

(John, what do you mean?)

The badger we had trapped gnawed its leg off. This is a common thing with them. They thrash at the trap, struggle so violently that sometimes they break bones. In the end if they cannot escape otherwise, they gnaw through their living flesh to gain release and crawl off into the brush to die. That was what happened with our trap. We came upon it, and the grass and kudzu vines were a mass of dull red blood. There in the green willow trap was the hind leg of the beast, tattered shreds of flesh still clinging to the bloody part where the beast had painfully torn its own leg off. The agony it must have suffered in its desire for freedom.

We followed the trail of blood. It was comparatively easy for the creature was bleeding its life away as it dragged itself from the trap. Over a hundred yards away, half-buried under a low scrub pine we found it. How it had made it that far, I don’t know, a tribute to its brute heart. It lay with its muzzle bared, those white foam-speckled teeth screaming out its rage and its defiance even in death. The talons were unsheathed and for a moment it seemed as if it were ready to attack. Only it was quite dead.

Martin stood for a long time and looked at the pitiful creature. Then he said, “It wasn’t truly free for it was returning to its own kind. It is only free of us.”

“That is so,” I said.

“But all humans on this planet are all bound in this fashion, one to the other, trapped as the beast was trapped by your trap. They are prisoners of a State that has bound them soul and mind and now they must be released from this trap so that they can find a new meaning, a new being. There will be those who will not survive the ordeal. Like this poor thing, they will gnaw their legs free of the trap and, before they can find help, they will crawl away and die.”

He paused and thought for a long time. “Yes,” he said at last, “it is better to crawl away and die than to resign oneself to the trap.”

After that we returned in time to see your forces attack the ship in all their fury. It took them a long time to gather courage, and when they finally destroyed the ship and rounded up the children, Martin was among them. He warned them that this was not the end, that the ship was only one of many. Still, they took him away—for interrogation, they said—and the troops and war machines invested the village against all provisions of the treaty.

(That was the way it was, Citizen. I myself was one of the board of elders that ordered the attack. We knew we had to destroy the ship. I suppose we knew that there would be others, but the ship had to be destroyed. Especially after we received intelligence on what the children were doing in the village.)

(Was it necessary to kill the children?)

(Do you question it? We had one, Martin, for interrogation. We had no need of the others and we found that they were dangerous and could not be imprisoned.)

It is not as easy to kill us as you might imagine, Inquisitor. You destroy the physical bodies but the personalities of such as we are infectious. Like some amoeboid organism, we breed and spread and become a part of others.

(John Talltrees? . . .)

No, Inquisitor, it is not he.

(Shut up. I will not believe it.)

Martin still exists. He left your interrogator after giving him the gift of special insight. It was not Martin’s fault that the interrogator was unable to reconcile his diverse personalities, that he became insane. Some of you will not and you will, of course, not survive. All of you must go through this evolution to rid yourselves of the influence of your State before you find that higher insight that Martin will bring you.

(What happened in the village?)

It is the end product of a million years of evolution.

(What happened an hour ago in the village?)

I can see it from here. We are, after all, only a few miles from the village. I sense that we are in one of your mobile interrogation vans. Surely, from this short a distance you must have seen?

(What happened in the village?)

They came from the sky. They knew that one of Their ships had been destroyed and now They knew the true menace represented by us. They might have gone from this system and found a new home in peace. Now They know that They must stand and wipe out the very menace They created. In the end, of course, we will prevail and They will be a part of us.

(What happened in the village? John, John.)

I am John. Through Martin’s eyes I saw the thing come out of the sky. It was even bigger than the one that had crashed before. It stretched over half the horizon and it came in with raging energies that caused the very mountains to flow. The pines burst into flames and feathered into charcoal. The pitiful few animals of the hills fled before it and were charred in turn. Then the village and all my people ... all my people ... all my people. . . .

(What about the troops?)

They are no more. Only Martin at a distance and I here remain. Martin, whom I taught friendship and who must go on, seeking new growth, new power until. . . .

(Inquisitor Jarvis, that sound.)

(No, They could not detect us.)

Hide, do what you will, They are determined to eliminate this infection.

(Sounds of hissing, falling structures, silence, then. . . .)

(Ohhh.)

(John, are you still there?)

Yes, I am here. We are here.

(The Citizen Interrogator is dead.)

It is unfortunate.

(Damn you and your cold acceptance of all this. Don’t you realize your own race is in deadly danger?)

Martin has told me so.

(Where is he?)

He went elsewhere. But a part of him remains here.

(Damn his soul, damn his soul.)

Why are you crying?

(My world, my ordered secure world, the Holy State and its Faithful. What have he and his creatures done to my world?)

They will make it anew, now that they are joined.

(No, no, I will not have it. He may have escaped but I will find him, track him down, kill him. . . .)

Send him to the Fields?

(Kill him, kill him with all the implacable rage of the badger you trapped.)

Gnaw off your leg, Inquisitor? Will you gnaw off your leg? Is this the way to freedom?

(Damn you, I have the power to. . . .)

Kill me.

(Kill you.) (Silence.)

(John, John, I am a just man, hard but just.)

(I am not a cruel man. John!)

(Oh, God in Heaven, why did I do that?)