Doom. Endgame

     1.


     The ship was 3.7 klicks long, and I walked

     every damned meter of it, trying to find where all the
creaks and groans were coming from. I wasn't sur-
prised to hear the haunting noises; I expected nothing
less nightmarish from the Fred aliens. They came to
us as aliens in demonic clothing, playing to every
Jungian fear that panicked the human race, from deep
inside the collective whatever you call it--Arlene
would know. Now their ship sounded like it was
tearing apart at the seams ... or like the entire uni-
verse was finally winding down. I walked down moist
fungus-infested passageways that were too tall, too
narrow, and too damned hot, listening to the universe
run down.
     Down and out. Mostly I walked the ship to keep
some sort of tab on Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders,
my ghost XO, who was falling apart on me. Nobody
goes off the deep end on Sergeant Flynn Taggart, not
without my say-so. But there was Arlene, sitting cross-
legged on the observation deck (the "mess hall") at
the stern of the Fred ship, staring at a redshifted eye of
light that was all the stars in the galaxy swirled into
one blob--some sort of relativity effect. She sat,
unblinking, peering down the corridor of time to
Earth today, which was probably Earth two hundred
years or more ago.
     Christ, but that sounds melancholy. Arlene hadn't
changed her uniform in three days, and she was
starting to stink up the place. I didn't want to inter-
rupt her grief: she had lost her beloved ... in a sense;
by the time we hit dirt at Fredworld, kicked some
Fred ass, and got them to turn us around back to
Earth again, about two hundred years would have
passed for the mudhoppers. Corporal Albert Gallatin
would be a century in his grave. He was as good as
dead to her now.
     Space is a lonely place; don't let anyone tell you
different. The spacefaring surround themselves with
friends and squadmates, but it only holds the empti-
ness of deep space partway off. You can still feel it
brushing your mind, probing for a weak point.
We tried playing various games to stave off the
loneliness; I came up with the favorite, Woe Is Me: we
competed to see who could spin the most depressing
tale of woe, me or Arlene . . . listing in endlessly
expanding detail all the different reasons to just open
a hatch and be blown into the interstellar void.
I always won--not that I had that many more
     reasons to despair than Arlene, but because I had
more practice complaining about things.
     "I left my true love behind," she would pine.
"At least you had one!" I retorted. "All I ever had
was a fiancÙe, and I'm not sure I even knew her
middle name." Sears and Roebuck, our normally
jovial binary Klave pair, were no help; they locked
themselves in their cabin and wouldn't come out.
They couldn't even be coaxed out for a game of Woe Is
Me! But lately Arlene was winning by default: she was
too depressed to play. She just sat and stared out the
rear window.
     The Fred ship was roughly cylindrical, spinning for
a kind of artificial gravity about 0.8 g at the outer
skin; in addition, during the first days, we had a heavy
acceleration pulling us backward as the ship got up to
speed. This was a Godsend; I always hated zero-g,
always. I always blew; I always got vertigo; I never
knew which way was up, because there was no up.
It was 3.7 kilometers long and about 0.375 kilome-
ters in diameter, I reckoned. I had some mild dizzi-
ness from the spin--my inner ear never really ad-
justed to that sort of crap--but it was a damned sight
better than the "float 'n' pukes" we rode from Earth
to Mars, or up to Phobos.
     For the last twenty-four hours, I had followed
Arlene up and down the ship when she went wander-
ing, through blackness and flickering light. The whole
place tasted vile; most of taste is smell, and the stench
got on the back of my tongue and stayed there.
Arlene probably knew I was there, but she made no
attempt to talk to me. Occasionally, I heard weapons
fire; I thought she might be shooting up the "dead"
bodies of the Fred aliens. I couldn't believe it; she
knew they could still feel the pain of the bullets! Then
I caught her discharging her shotgun into a man-
shaped chalk outline she'd drawn on a bulkhead in a
stateroom that once belonged to the ship's engineer, a
Fred who was deactivated up on the bridge.
     "What the hell are you doing, A.S.?" I demanded.
"Shooting," she said, staring dully at me. She slid
her hands up and down the barrel of her piece, getting
gun grease on her palms, but she didn't notice.
"You're shooting into a steel bulkhead, you brain-
dead dweeb! Where do you think the bullets are going
when they bounce off it?"
     Arlene said nothing. She hadn't been hit by a
ricochet yet, but if she kept shooting at steel bulk-
heads, it was only a matter of moments.
     Two minutes after I left, I heard the shooting start
up again, but she denied later that she had fired her
rifle again.
     I returned to the bridge for a long face-to-face with
the "dead" Fred captain. They're not like us ...
rather, we're not like them or the rest of the intelligent
races of the galaxy.
     A Fred alien, and everybody else except a human,
can never die. Even when you shoot his body to Swiss
cheese, so his blue guts and red blood dribble out the
holes onto the deck, his consciousness remains intact.
Blow his head apart, and it floats as a ghost, drifting
like invisible smoke--still thinking, hearing and see-
ing, feeling and desperately dreaming. You can talk to
them; they actually hear you.
     The Freds and other races pile their dead in fantas-
tic cenotaph theaters where they are entertained day
and night by elaborate operas and dances of great
beauty, all to keep the "dead" vibrant and interested
until such time as they're needed for revivification--
assuming there's enough left of the body and enough
interest on the part of an animate Fred to pay for it.
I'd shot the captain nine days ago as he lay on the
floor, reaching up to implement and lock in the
preprogrammed course for Fredworld. Despite the
best efforts of me and Arlene and our contractor-
advisors Sears and Roebuck--a Klave binary pair
who each looked like a cross between Magilla Gorilla
and Alley Oop--we couldn't figure out how to change
course or even shut off the engines.
     I picked the captain up and sat him in the co-pilot's
chair. Poetic justice; he had died bravely ... let him
see where he was going. Now I stood directly in front
of the bastard so his dead eyes could drink me in.
"God, I wish I could repair your wounds and bring
you back to life," I said, "so I could kill you all over
again and again and again, and repeat the process
until you told me how to turn this piece-of-crap ship
around. But I promise you I'll obliterate your brain
before I'll let you be recaptured and revived by your
Fred buddies."
     I blamed the captain for Arlene's psychosis; I would
never forgive him for it and would kill him again if I
ever got the chance.
     Christ, where to jump in on this thing? I never
know where to start to bring everyone up to date.
Sears and Roebuck had locked themselves in their
stateroom, the double-entities shouting that we were
all doomed, game over, pull the plug! God only knew
where they picked up the expressions, but the senti-
ment was pretty clear: when we got to Fredworld, the
most logical outcome was for us to be burned into a
nice warm plasma by the batteries of heavy-particle
weapons the Freds obviously had ringing their hellish
planet.
     I'm not a big fan of logic. Logic predicted that
Arlene and I would be smoked during our last en-
counter with the Freds. They had everything except
the homecourt advantage, and even that was dicey,
the way they could change the architecture of Phobos
and Deimos at the drop of a flaming snotball.
When this donnybrook first started, Arlene and I
both thought we were dealing with actual honest-to-
Lucifer demons from hell! They sure looked like
demons; we battled the sons of bitches deep, deeper
into the Union Aerospace Corporation facilities on
Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars. All the
rest of Fox Company, Light Drop Marine Corps
Infantry, were killed . . . and some were "reworked"
into undead zombies.
     That was the worst, seeing my buddies coming at
me, brainless but still clutching their weaponry. I
mowed them down, feeling a little death every time I
killed a former friend.
     But we faced far more dangerous foes: imps, or
spineys, as Arlene liked to call them, who hurled
flaming balls of mucus; pinkies ... two meters of
gigantic mouth with a little pair of legs attached; we
faced down ghosts we couldn't see, minotaurlike hell
princes with fireball shooters on their wrists ... even
gigantic one-eyed pumpkins that floated and spat
lightning balls at us! But the worst of all were the
steam demons: fifteen feet tall with rocket launchers,
it was virtually impossible to kill the SOBs.
On Earth, we discovered that the Freds were geneti-
cally engineering monsters to look and act like human
beings, until they suddenly opened up on you with
machine guns. They had a few failed attempts that
were horrific enough, one a walking skeleton!
But the whole mission turned on a fundamental
misunderstanding: when last the Freds contacted us,
we were at the dividing line between the Medieval and
Renaissance periods, like the late 1400s--and they
somehow got the idea we still were. They never
realized how fast we evolved socially and technologi-
cally; nobody else did it that fast! They came scream-
ing in with demonic machines and genetically engi-
neered fiends, thinking we would fall cowering to our
knees, and conquest would be swift and brutal.
They weren't prepared for a technological society
that no longer believed in demons. They weren't
ready for the Light Drop Marine Corps Infantry; they
weren't prepared for Arlene and me.
     We triumphed, and I got another stripe, but now I
was willing to bet a month's leave that we were
driving into destruction. No matter how long your
hand, the dice eventually turn against you. At least let
me take a few dozen of them with me, I prayed.
But without Arlene I didn't have much of a chance,
let alone much reason, to go on. Earth was dead to me
now; when we got back there, if we got back, what
would be left after three or four centuries? Would
there be a United States, a Washington Monument, a
United States Marine Corps? For all we knew, the
Earth was "already" a smoking burnt-out cinder
("already" is a relative term, we've found out; by the
time we get back, it will have happened a certain
number of centuries in the past; that's all I can say).
Stars rolled past the porthole beneath my feet;
actually, it was the ship that rotated, but everything
was relative. I followed Arlene as she traversed the
ship. She set up her shooting range in the aft cargo-
hold, a ways outboard ("down") from the mess hall,
seventy meters high and wide and nearly half a
kilometer long. I was desperate--I had to snap her
out of her zombie mode. I had to do something! So
just as my redheaded lance corporal babe raised her
M-14, I stepped out of the shadows directly in front of
her.
     It was an incredibly stupid thing to do--but I had
no choice, no other way to get her attention. She
almost squeezed off a burst anyway, because she just
plain didn't see me. As Arlene squeezed the trigger,
she realized the range wasn't clear. She screamed--
like a woman!--and jerked the barrel to the left.
A single three-round burst escaped anyway. One of
the bullets creased my uniform; it felt like she had
whipped me across the arm with a corrections staff. It
hurt like hell!
     "FLY!" she screamed, slinging her rifle aside and
running up to me.
     I sank to one knee, holding my arm; it wasn't
bleeding bad, but I was knocked off balance by the
blow--and by the knowledge that had Arlene reacted
a fraction of a second slower, I would have been
stretched out on the steel deckplates, coughing up my
own blood.
     Completely calm now, Arlene Sanders un-Velcroed
my Marine recon jacket and gently slipped it off my
arm. When she saw the wound was just a crease, and I
would recover in a couple of days, she let loose with a
string of invective and obscenities that was Corps to
the core! They echoed off the black saw-toothed walls
and rattled my brainpan.
     She shook me viciously by the uniform blouse.
"You dumbass bastard, Fly! What the hell were you
thinking, jumping into the line like that? Don't an-
swer! You weren't thinking, that's the problem!" She
let me sink back to the deck, suddenly nervous about
overstepping the chain. "Uh, that's the problem,
Sergeant," she lamely corrected.
     I sat up, wiping away the tears on my good sleeve.
"Arlene, you dumb broad, I was thinking thoughts as
deep as the starry void. I was thinking, now how can I
finally get that catatonic zombie girl's attention and
snap her out of her despair over Albert?"
     "Jesus, Fly, is that what this is about?"
I put my hand on my shoulder, massaging the
     muscle gently through my T-shirt. "Lance, I was
about ready to hypo you into unconsciousness for a
few days to let you work it all out in your dreams. God
knows we have enough time--two hundred years to
Fredworld, or eight and a half weeks from our point of
view. I was just about ready to give up on you."
Arlene stared down at the deck, but I wouldn't let
up; I finished what I had to say. "I can't afford to lose
you, A.S. Those binary freaks Sears and Roebuck are
a great source of intel and sardonic comments, but
they can't fight for crap. I need you at my back, A.S.; I
need the old Arlene. You've got to come back to me
and work your magic."
     She turned and walked away from me, leaning
against the hot bulkhead and swearing under her
breath. She couldn't really say anything out loud, not
after I had made a point of dragging rank into it (I
called her "Lance" to drive home the chain of com-
mand). But nothing in the UCMJ said she had to like
it.
     She didn't. She wouldn't speak to me the rest of the
day, and all of the next. She took to sulking in the big
lantern-lit cabin we had dubbed the mess hall, since
that was where we took our meals--well, used to take
them; Sears and Roebuck were still holed up in their
own stateroom, cowering in terror at the upcoming
brawl with the Freds when we hit dirtside; and Arlene
ate Anywhere But There, so she wouldn't have to eat
with me; when I entered, she left by another portal, so
I ate alone. Then when I left to return to duty (staring
out the forward video screen, wondering when some-
thing would happen), Arlene snuck in and hid away
from me.
     I barely saw her any more often than I had before
. . . but I felt a thousand percent relieved, because
now she was angry rather than desolate and apathetic.
Anger. Now that I have a good handle on. I'm a
Marine, for Christ's sake! What I couldn't understand
was despair.
     Angry Marines don't stay angry for long, especially
not at their NCOs. Sergeants are buttheads; we'd both
known that since Parris Island! After a while, Arlene
took to haunting the mess hall when I was there,
sitting far away; then she sat at my too-tall table, but
at the other end; then she got around to eating across
from me ... but she glared a hell of a lot.
     I waited, patiently and quietly. Eventually, her
need for human company battered down her fury at
me for risking my life like I did, and she started
making snippy comments.
     I knew I'd won when she sat down four days after
the shooting incident and demanded, "All right, Ser-
geant, now tell me again why you had to do something
so bone-sick stupid as to step in front of a live rifle."
"To piss you off," I answered, truthfully.
     Arlene stared, her mouth hanging open. She had
shaved her hair into a high-and-tight again, and it was
so short on top, it was almost iridescent orange. Her
uniform was freshly laundered--Sears and Roebuck
had showed us how to use the Fred washing machines
when we first took over the ship, two weeks earlier--
and I swear to God she had ironed everything. She
had been working out, too; she looked harder, tighter
than she had just a few days earlier, and it wasn't just
her haircut. Now I was the only one getting soft and
flabby.
     "To piss me off? For God's sake, why?"
"A.S.," I said, leaning so close we were breathing
each other's O2, "I don't think you realize how close I
came to losing you. Despair is a terrible, terrible
mental illness; apathy is a freaking disease. I had to do
something so shocking, something to give you such a
burst of adrenaline, that it would jerk you out of your
feedback loop and drag you, kicking and screaming,
back to the here and now."
     I scratched my stubbly chin, feeling myself flush.
"All right, maybe it was pretty bone-sick stupid. But I
was desperate! What should I have done? I don't think
you know just what you mean to me, old girl."
She slid up to sit cross-legged on the table, staring
around the huge empty mess hall. No officers around,
and no non-coms but me. Why not? "Fly," she said,
"I don't think you know just what Albert meant to
me. Means--meant--is he dead or alive now?"
     "Probably still alive. It's only been about twenty
years or so on Earth ... or will have only been by this
point, when we get back there--by which point, it'll
have been two centuries. It's weird; it's confusing; it's
not worth worrying about." I ate another blue square;
they tasted somewhat like ravioli--crunchy outside
and stuffed with worms that tasted half like cheese,
half like chocolate cake. It sounds dreadful, but really
it's not bad when you get used to it. A lot better than
the orange squares and gray dumplings, which tasted
like rotten fish. The Fred aliens had truly stomach-
turning tastes, by and large.
     "Fly, when I first joined the squad--you remember
Gunny Goforth and the William Tell apple on the
head duel?--you were my only friend then."
     I remembered the incident. Gunnery Sergeant Go-
forth was just being an asshole because he didn't
think women belonged in the Corps--not the Corps
and definitely not the Light Drop Marine Corps
Infantry--and no way in the nine circles of hell, not
by the livin' Gawd that made him, was Gunnery
Sergeant Harlan E. Goforth ever going to let some
pussy into Fox Company, the machoest, fightingest
company of the whole macho, fighting Light Drop!
He decreed that no gal could join his company
unless she proved herself by letting him shoot an apple
off her head! And Arlene did it! She stood there and let
him take it off with a clean shot from a .30-99 bolt-
action sniper piece. With iron sights, yet.
     Then, with a little malicious sneer on her lips, she
calmly tossed a second apple to Goforth and made
him wear the fruit while she did the William Tell bit.
We all loved it; to his credit, the gunny stood tall and
didn't flinch and let her pop it off his dome at fifty
meters. After that, what could the Grand Old Man do
but welcome her to Fox, however reluctantly?
Back in the Freds' mess hall, Arlene continued,
nibbling at her own blue square. "You're still my best
and first, Fly. But Albert was the first man I really
loved. Wilhelm Dodd was the first guy to care about
me that way; but I didn't know what love meant until
... oh Jesus, that sounds really stupid, doesn't it?"
I climbed onto the table myself, and we sat back to
back. I liked feeling her warmth against me. It was
like keeping double-watch, looking both ways at once.
"No. It would have sounded dumb, except I know
exactly what you mean. I felt that once, too: young girl
in high school, before I joined the Corps."
     "You never told me, Sergeant--Fly."
"We got as close as you could in a motor vehicle not
built for the purpose. She swore she was being reli-
gious about the pill, but she got pregnant anyway. I
offered to pay either way, and she chose the abortion.
After that, well, it just wasn't there anymore; I think
they sucked more than the fetus out, to be perfectly
grotesque about it ... We stopped pretending to be
boyfriend-girlfriend when it just got too painful; and
then she and her parents moved away. She just waved
goodbye, and I nodded."
     Arlene snorted. "That's the longest rap you've ever
given me, Fly. Where'd you read it?"
     "God's own truth, A.S. Really happened just that
way."
     Arlene leaned back against me, while I stared out
the aft port at the redshifted starblob; the mess hall
was at the south end of a north-going ship, 1.9
kilometers from the bridge, which was located amid-
ships, surrounded by a hundred meters of some weird
steel-titanium alloy, and 3.7 kilometers from the
engines, all the way for'ard. Sitting in the mess hall,
we could look directly backward out a huge, thick,
plexiglass window while traveling very near the speed
of light relative to the stars behind us.
     It was a fascinating view; according to astronomical
theory--which I'd had plenty of time to read about
since we'd been burning from star to star--at relativ-
istic speeds, the light actually bends: all the stars
forward press together into a blue blob at the front, all
the ones aft press into a red lump at the stern. I wasn't
sure how fast we were going, but the formula was easy
enough to use if I really got interested.
     "I just had a horrible thought," I said. "We only
brought along enough Fredpills to last a few days. We
didn't plan on spending weeks here." Arlene didn't
say anything, so I continued. "We'll have to find the
Fred recombinant machine and figure out how to use
it; maybe Sears and Roebuck know." Fredpills sup-
plied the amino acids and vitamins essential to hu-
mans that Freds lacked in their diet; without them, we
would starve to death, no matter how much Fred food
we ate.
     "Fly," she said, off in another world, "I'm starting
not to care about the Freds anymore. I know why they
attacked us: they were terrified of what we repre-
sented, death and an honest-to-God soul, and maybe
the god of the Israelites is right, huh? Maybe we're the
immortal ones ... not the rest of them, the ones who
can't die."
     "So are you thinking that Albert still exists some-
where, maybe in heaven?" I was trying to wrap myself
around her problem, not having much luck.
     She shrugged; I felt it roughly. "So he himself
believed; I would never contradict an article of my
honey's faith, especially when I don't have any con-
trary evidence."
     "Translation into English?"
"I've just stopped caring about the Fred aliens, Fly.
They're frightened, desperate, and pretty pathetic.
And they're soulless. I mean, two humans against how
many of them? Even when Albert and Jill joined us,
we were still four against a planetful! And we kicked
ass. Maybe it's just the Marine in me, but I'm starting
to wonder why we're bothering with these dweebs."
"Well, we've got about forty-five days left to get our
heads straight for what's probably going to be the final
curtain for Fly and Arlene, not to mention poor old
Sears and Roebuck. They may be soulless and lousy
soldiers, but put enough of them in a room shooting
at us and we're going down, babe."
     Arlene reached into her breast pocket and pulled
out two twelve-gauge shells, which she tossed over her
shoulder to land perfectly in my lap. "I've saved the
last two for us, Sarge; just let me know when you're
ready to Hemingway."



     2

     Forty-five days is a hell of a long time when
we knew we were dropping into a dead zone, even for
the Light Drop. Then again, it's not really that long at
all ... when that's probably our entire life expec-
tancy.
     Arlene snapped out of her despair because she
didn't want to spend her last few weeks in a self-
imposed hell, I guess. She had me, I had her; that's
how it was in the beginning, that looked to be how it
would end. Except we both had Sears and Roebuck,
and that's where everything started to break down.
We're Marines above all, and we're programmed
like computers to protect and serve, you understand.
That means we couldn't just lock and load, stand back
to back, and prepare to go down in a hail of Fred-fire
when the ship cracked down and the cargo doors
opened on Fredworld. We had this crazy idea that we
had to protect those two--that one?--Alley Oop,
Magilla Gorilla look-alike Klave, or at least try.
Step one was to coax it, her, him, or them out of the
damned stateroom. We tried the direct approach first:
Arlene and I climbed "up" toward the central axis of
the ship. The acceleration decreased to 0.2 g at the
level of Sears and Roebuck's quarters, barely enough
to avoid my old problems with vertigo. I sure didn't
want to go any farther inboard, that was for damned
sure.
     Arlene didn't look bothered, though; various parts
of her anatomy floated pretty free under her uniform,
and she looked like she was loving it. I tried not to
look at such temptations--fifty-eight days left; I
wanted to spend it with my buddy, not trying to force
a relationship that had never existed and never ought
to exist.
     The "upper" corridors were like sewer pipes, corru-
gated and smelly. The Freds breathed slightly differ-
ent air than we, but it didn't seem poisonous (Sears
and Roebuck swore we could breathe the Fred air).
Very tall corridors, to accommodate the Freds when
they were in their seed-depositing stage, like gigantic
praying mantises ... I couldn't reach the roof even
by jumping.
     Arlene and I slipped and slid down the hot slimy
passageway; it took me a few moments to realize that
the slime was decomposing leaves from their
     artichoke-heads.
"You know," said my lance, when I told her my
insight, "we don't even know whether these are dis-
carded leaves, or whether it's the decomposed bodies
of the Freds themselves. What happens to their bodies
when they die? Do they have to put some preservative
on them, like Egyptian mummies, to prevent this
from happening?" She kicked a pile of glop in which
were still visible the ragged framelines of Fred head-
leaves.
     I shook my head. "I suppose we can keep an eye on
the captain and see if he begins to deteriorate."
We figured out that slithering was the easiest way to
move along the passageway without falling; it was like
ice-skating through an oil slick, but we finally made it
to the Sears and Roebuck stateroom.
     "Stateroom" was an apt description; it was pretty
stately. Because they had to accommodate the con-
stantly changing size of the Freds, the rooms were
built to monstrous scale, but with a nice mix of
furniture styles. My own, next to Arlene's down
toward the hull in heavier acceleration, had a couple
of sit-kneels, a table I could only reach by standing
and stretching, and a doughnut-shaped bed-couch.
I had no idea what was inside Sears and Roebuck's
quarters because they had not allowed Arlene or me
even to sneak a peek. I stood outside the door and
pounded the pine, as we used to say at Parris Island,
then I thought better of it--Sears and Roebuck had
been acting awfully weird lately. I stepped off to one
side in case they decided to burn right through the
door with a weapon.
     Silence. After the second pounding, their shared
voice came back with a carefully enunciated "go to
away!"
     "Open up, Sears and Roebuck!" shouted Arlene,
exasperated after just ten seconds of dealing with
their intransigence.
     "Jeez, you'd never make it as a therapist, A.S."
"I follow the flashlight-pounded-into-the-head
school of psychiatry," she said, and for the first time,
it almost sounded as if her heart were in the joke.
"Go to elsewhere!"
     "What are you?" I demanded. "Afraid of dying?
Why? You can't die!"
     During a long pause, I heard furniture being shoved
around. Then the door slid open a crack and two
heads, one atop the other, pressed two eyes to the
crack. "We once had our spine broken," they said.
They didn't have spines, exactly; their central nervous
system ran right down the center, from what I had
seen in their medical records. But it was actually more
easily severed than ours because it wasn't protected
by a bone sheath.
     "You recovered as soon as someone found you,"
Arlene pointed out. "Right?"
     "We lay for eleven days into the jungle on [unintelli-
gible planet name]. The Freds slay us will kill us and
display-put us on for eternity and throw head-leaves
at us." Sears and Roebuck still had a hard time with
English, despite ambassadorial status.
     "Come on, S and R," I tried. "Get a grip. You don't
see me and Arlene cringing--and if we die, we're
gone forever!"
     They said something too quietly to catch; it
sounded like "we wish we could," but it could have
been "the less you could."
     "S and R, Arlene and I need your help. We need to
make a plan for when we hit dirtside on Fredworld."
"Fredpills," added Arlene in my ear.
     "And we need you to show us how to synthesize
enough Fredpills to keep us alive to Fredworld ... we
need about, oh, two hundred and seventy."
     Sears and Roebuck did a fast calculation--forty-
five days times two people times three meals per day.
"You admit we have no plan for to live past landing
time!"
     "TouchÙ," admitted Arlene, under her breath.
Crap! "For now we need four hundred! We'll need
more--lots, lots more--for surviving on Fredworld
until we can figure out how to work one of these
damned ships and hop it back home. And you need
pills, too, Sears and Roebuck."
     The two Alley Oop faces stared at us a moment,
then the Klaves slid open the door with their long
limbs, which grew like Popeye arms from below their
necks. "We are doomed inside the cabin as out the
side the cabin."
     "So you may as well enjoy your last days of life with
freedom to move around," I urged. "After you die,
you'll see and hear only what they choose to show you
. . . if anything."
     "Yes, you are the right about that. You must enter."
They stepped out of the way like Siamese twins, and
I entered their quarters for the first time, followed by
Arlene. The cabin was so amazingly bizarre that I
could barely recognize it as being essentially the same
(in structure) as mine! All the furniture was pushed
into a huge snarl in the middle of the room, and every
square centimeter of wall space was covered by some-
thing, whether it was an abstract artwork with real
3-D effects or a mop head nailed to the wall. It looked
like a homicidal maniac's idea of interior design:
making the room look like the inside of their disor-
dered minds.
     "What the hell?" asked Arlene, staring around at
the walls. Sears and Roebuck stood in the center of
the room next to the pile of junk, watching us
narrowly. The weird part wasn't that they put stuff up
on their walls--I confess to the nasty habit of putting
the occasional girly pic or Franks tank action shot on
my own walls, when I had something to put. But Sears
and Roebuck covered literally every smidgen of bulk-
head, as if their terror at the pending landing on
Fredworld somehow transferred itself to a fear of
battleship gray, the color of the metal behind the
pictures. They figured out how to work the printer in
the room and dumped every image they could find to
plaster on the bulkheads. Then, when they ran out of
paper, they started attaching domestic Fred appli-
ances with StiKro. They even turned a table on its
side and pressed it against one wall.
     The overhead was the color of cooling lava, black
with red crack highlights, and it didn't seem to bother
them. I rather liked it myself, and I wasn't a fan of the
wall color--but still!
     I looked around. "Do you, ah, you-all want to talk
about this?" I tried to sound casual.
     "No," said Sears and Roebuck, without a trace of
emotion. And that was that. They never again re-
ferred to the wallpapering, they never explained it,
and we never found out what the hell they thought
they were doing. I think Arlene and I learned some-
thing very interesting about alien psychology on Day
Thirteen of our trip into Fredland; now if only we
knew what we found out!
     Sears and Roebuck came out of their hole without
looking back, took a new stateroom, and made no
effort to cover the walls. We began rehearsing for our
last stand, when we would hit dirtside and the doors
would slide open.
     We even knew what doors would open first. Sears
and Roebuck went to work on the Fred computer and
cracked it, or part of it, at least. The sequence display
of the mission was unclassified, and they displayed it
on the 3-D projector in the room we had decided to
call the bridge, where the captain's body still sat in the
co-pilot's chair without decomposing, although his
head-leaves had ceased to grow, leaving in place the
atrocious orange and black Halloween combination
that he wore when I killed him . . . probably a sign of
the emotion of desperate terror.
     The timeline was precisely detailed: we knew the
very moment we would touch dirt--three days earlier
than I guessed--and which systems would operate at
what moment. The door-open sequence began about
seventy-five minutes after touchdown, and the first
door to open after safety checks and powerdown was
the aft, ventral cargo bay; it would take eleven min-
utes to grind backward out of the way. Over the next
fifty minutes or so, eleven other doors and access
portals would release, and all but two of them would
open automatically. We would be boarded by an
unholy army of monsters.
     The only question was whether the Fred captain
had gotten a damned message off before we over-
whelmed his defenses. Probably. The final combat
took nearly an hour. Would it have done the Fred any
good?
     At first, I thought that would give them two hun-
dred years' advance notice that we were coming, but
Arlene hooted with laughter when I mentioned it.
"What, you think their message travels at infinite
speed? What do you think this is, science fiction?"
I wracked my neurons for several minutes--physics
was never my strong suit, especially not special rela-
tivity. Then I suddenly realized my stupidity: any
message sent by the Fred captain could travel only at
the speed of light.... It would take it two hundred
years to reach Fredworld!
     So how much of a head start did it have over us?
"Um ... twenty years?" I guessed.
     Arlene shook her head emphatically. "If our time
dilation factor is eight and a half weeks, or, say, sixty
days, to two hundred years passing on Earth and
Fredworld--the planets are barely moving relative to
each other, compared to lightspeed--then we have to
be moving at virtually lightspeed ourselves, relative to
both planets. Hang on . . ." She poked at her watch
calculator. "Fly, we're making about 99.99996 per-
cent of lightspeed relative to Earth or Fredworld. At
that clip, we would travel two hundred light-years and
arrive only thirty-five minutes after the message."
I jumped to my feet. "Arlene, that's fantastic! They
won't have any time at all to prepare, barely half an
hour! Maybe they can mobilize a few security forces,
but nothing like a--"
     "Whoa, whoa, loverboy, slow down!" Arlene settled
back, putting her feet up on the table, narrowly
missing her half-eaten plate of blue squares. "If it's
actually sixty-one days subjective time instead of fifty-
eight, or the planets are really two hundred and nine
light-years apart instead of two hundred, that half-an-
hour figure is completely inaccurate. And much more
important, that was assuming we achieved our speed
instantly. But we didn't. ... It took us about three
days to ramp up, and it'll take another three days to
decelerate; during most of that time, we're going slow
enough that there's hardly any time dilation effect at
all."
     "So you're saying ... so the Fred should have
what, six days' advance notice we're on our way?"
"Hm. basically, yeah. The biggest factor is the
acceleration-deceleration time, when we're not mov-
ing at relativistic speeds."
     "So let's assume they have six days to prepare," I
said. "That's a hard figure?"
     "Hard enough, Fly. I mean, Sergeant. Best we can
do, in any event. I'm not entirely sure Sears and
Roebuck is giving us good intel on the Fred units of
measurement."
     Six days for the enemy to mobilize wasn't good, but
I could live with it. It was sure a hell of a lot better
than two centuries.
     I devised a plan, as the senior man present, though
Arlene had a few good ideas for booby traps. If the
Fred had six days to prepare for our arrival, we had
eight weeks! We made good use of the time, practicing
a slow, steady retreat down the ship, sealing off
segments behind us and activating homemade bombs
to wreck the thing. We couldn't win, of course, not in
the long run, but then, as someone once said, the
trouble with the long run is that in the long run
everybody's dead!
     Well, the bastards would pay for every meter. That
was my only goal, and at the staff meeting, Arlene and
even Sears and Roebuck regularly agreed with me. I
kept us hyped by unexpected alarm drills; Sears and
Roebuck figured out how to rig the ship's computer to
ring various emergency sirens and kill power in
different parts of the ship. I did the timing myself,
keeping the others on their toesies.
     Then Arlene got tired of dancing like a puppet on a
chain, and she conspired with Sears and Roebuck to
simulate a General Catastrophe 101: all the power on
the ship dies except for faint warning horns all the
way for'ard in the engine room, the computer (on a
separate circuit) announces the self-destruct sequence
started with nineteen minutes until vaporization,
sound effects of a raging hurricane, and the enviros
blow enough air across me to simulate a massive hull
breech somewhere down south. Scared the bejesus out
of me! By the time the ship was down to thirty
seconds to detonation, and I still couldn't find the
blessed breech, I was reduced to running in circles like
a chicken with its head cut off, screaming and shout-
ing like a raging drunk!
     When I recovered my normal heart rate and respi-
ration, I clapped Arlene in irons for the rest of the
trip. No, not really, but I threatened to do so, and had
she stopped laughing long enough to hear me, I think
she would have been terrified.
     Sears and Roebuck had a weird sense of humor:
they went in for the bizarre practical joke, like some-
how attaching sound effects to our weapons. I visited
our makeshift "rifle range"--an unused manifest
hold with five hundred meters of jagged, saw-tooth
corridor and brightly colored markings at the far
end--but every damned round I fired went to its
doom with a long piercing scream of "heeee-
     eeeeeeeee-eeelp!" God only knows where S and R
sampled the sound effect.
     I was stunned when Sears and Roebuck told me and
Arlene that the practical joke was the only universal
form of humor throughout the galaxy. It was a sad day
for me. I had hoped that galactic civilization would
have progressed somewhere beyond the emotional
level of a thirteen-year-old.
     But it brought up an interesting point: was it
possible the Freds were simply playing an elaborate
and unfunny practical prank on us when they invaded
first Phobos, then Mars, then Earth itself? Maybe they
considered the humans who fought back to be a
bunch of humorless bastards who couldn't take a joke!
"No, that's without sane," said Sears and Roebuck.
"The practicals are unallowed to damageate the vic-
tim or they lose their wisdom."
     "Their wisdom?"
Sears and Roebuck looked at each other; they put
their Popeyelike hands on each head and gently
pumped each other back and forth, a mannerism that
Arlene and I had decided, during the trip, was their
way of displaying frustration at our language. "What
it is, they lose their cleverness. They are infunny is
how you say it."
     "Okay, I get it. Well, joke or not, we didn't like it,
and the Freds are going to find out just how much we
didn't like it when that cargo door begins to grind
open."
     Four days before landing, the Fred ship began its
automatic deceleration; all of a sudden, we had more
than a full Earth gravity for'ard, once again giving us
a weird, double-heavy vector toward the outer corner
of the room. Arlene did some calculations and figured
that the ship was actually accelerating at about ninety-
six g's--that's what it took to decelerate from our
velocity relative to Fredworld to match orbit in four
days! So there must have been the mother of all
inertial damping fields to dissipate that force in the
form of heat around the ship. We would probably
have appeared star-white to an infrared viewer--a big
blazing flare warning the Fred of our imminent arriv-
al, in case they'd forgotten.
     All good things must come to an end. The night
before we were to land, when we still had not been
hailed or attacked en route by the Freds, Arlene spent
the night nestled in my arms. It wasn't the first tim