Operation Ares Read online

  THE INVASION FROM MARS

  came in the early years of the 21st century. And all over America were people praying for it to succeed... .

  For two decades, the United States had been slipping into a primitive past, turning its back on technology—and abandoning it's Martian colony . Its “emergency" government was kept" . in power by repression, food was scarce, life grim . . . ami killer packs of wild animals prowled at night, making curfews a vital need.

  Then the “Martians" came back. An obscure teacher, John Castle, was among the first to see the invaders—and made a desperate try to aid them. He failed then, but there was a strange role waiting for Castle to play..,.

  Operation ARES

  by Gene Wolfe

  To my mother and father,

  who never read fiction

  With the exception of such historical personages

  as Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, no resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, is intended.

  Copyright © 1970 by Gene Wolfe

  All rights reserved

  Published by arrangement with the author

  BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, JULY, 1970

  SBN 425-01858-X

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by

  Berkley Publishing Corporation

  200 Madison Avenue New York,

  N. Y, 10016

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS ® TM 757,375

  Printed in the United States of America

  OPERATION ARES

  Contents

  OPERATION ARES

  CHAPTER I “SUPPOSE THEY COME AT NIGHT . . . ?"

  CHAPTER II “A MAN OF THIS PLANET . . ."

  CHAPTER III "... AS YOU MUST SURELY HAVE ANTICIPATED —"

  CHAPTER IV “I KNOW WHERE MY DUTY LIES"

  CHAPTER V ".... WHERE THE LION SLEEPS”

  CHAPTER VI ".... PRESIDENT CHARLES H. HUGGINS!”

  CHAPTER VII " .... WHERE ONLY DELIGHT LIVES ...."

  CHAPTER VIII “POWER DWELLS IN THE HEART"

  CHAPTER VIII "... OVER BEFORE SUNRISE”

  CHAPTER X "... STAND BACK AND BE STATESMEN”

  CHAPTER I

  “SUPPOSE THEY COME AT NIGHT . . . ?"

  The wind blew dust past the tall man as he wrestled to open the gate. It was set in a fence, a fortification erected by the very poor, high and thick as a wall and spined with trash treasure of salvaged barbed wire. Its contorted stakes were sharpened at the top; rusted chicken mesh had been interwoven in the design. Every third wire was cut, and the

  points bent outward, like the tips of the scavenged nails driven

  through the boards of the gate.

  As the gate swung open he ran his eyes critically over the weathered farmhouse beyond, paying particular attention to the roof line. Carefully he replaced the bars behind him. Only a sliver of sun was still glinting above the hills when he knocked on the farmhouse door.

  Quick steps, light and almost silent, responded at once. “It’s John!” he called. “Is everything all right?”

  She was nodding as she opened the door. Anna seldom spoke when a gesture would do as well.

  “Bunk in the usual place?” he asked.

  She nodded again and smiled, drinking him in with her dark eyes in a way that made him feel uncomfortable about his long, knobby limbs and shabby clothing.

  “You’re late, John.” It was not the girl who spoke but her brother, coming down the narrow hall that ran to the front of the house from the kitchen. “We were scared something happened to you; Anna’s been worried to death.”

  “Mars won’t be up for nearly two hours yet,” John answered calmly. “And you don't have to worry about me, Japhet.” The girl touched his sleeve and he added, "None of you do. Besides, the curfew doesn’t begin for another hour.”

  "Without you we’re finished,” Anna’s brother said. “The whole thing would be down the hole. A girl and a kid and a wakey like me could never handle it. You got to stop taking chances like this. Being big and carrying a stick ain’t enough.”

  "Isn't,” John said automatically, then flushed. “Listen to me—Ichabod Crane, the country schoolmaster.”

  “That’s your trade. We don’t any of us mind; set me straight.”

  Looking at him John wondered if he could be unconscious of the irony of what he said, for Japhet was a hunchback.

  In the parlor of the old house, set at the focus of the room like an altar, hung the smiling photograph of a man in a bubble-helmet and a bulging, ungainly suit which trailed wires. Sunlight had faded the picture to a sepia tone, but the germ plasm Space had touched lived on in Japhet, and perhaps (the thought was like the touch of ice) covertly in Anna.

  A “wakey,” Japhet endured a life without sleep. The tensions and frustrations others relieved in dreams, accumulated in Japhet until after weeks or months they produced a collapse and coma. The bent back was not the result of a deformed spine but of the convulsive contractions of back and chest muscles rebelling against the perpetual vigil. John’s lik-ing, pity, and repulsion had fused inseparably and though he knew the pity was offensive and the repulsion undeserved, it did not help.

  “Gome on back,” Japhet was saying. “Have something to eat.” His eyes, dark as Anna’s, were the alert, sad eyes of a laboratory monkey.

  The kitchen was plain but homelike, the most attractive room in the house. Working feet had worn through the linoleum to the boards, but color lingered in corners and lent cheerfulness to the smooth wooden furnishings and Anna’s polished utensils. A fire blazed on the brick hearth. The boy, Nonny, who sat eating stew from a cracked cup, was so clearly delighted to see him that John could not help feeling flattered. “Everything’s ready, Mr. Castle,” Nonny said respectfully. “I checked it all out before they made me eat this.”

  “Aerial all right? I was worried about it Monday when we had the big storm.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry,” Japhet put in. “I set that up there to stay. Can’t no one see it from the road either, no matter what you say.”

  “You can see a bit over the top of the north gable,” John answered calmly, “and you yourself are the one who tells me the patrol cruiser goes past here at least once nearly every night”

  “The tip end of one dipole." A puff of breath blew it to contempt.

  From the distance, nearly lost in the wilderness of limestone and pines, there came a sound, a strangled scream broken into many parts—like the laughter of a madman or a demon, bereft of all hope, all joy, and at last of meaning. They froze, John Castle as unmoving as the others as he watched them. Anna said, “Suppose they come at night, Japhet? They do sometimes, you know.”

  Later, when the red spark of Mars showed above the hills, all four ascended to the attic of the farmhouse. The generator Japhet had converted with laborious ingenuity to partnership with a small, charcoal-fired steam engine squatted compactly in the angle between floor and roof.

  When the generator was humming the picture tube glowed to life at the touch of a switch. The colors were like gems. the primary paintbox reds and blues giving an effect of newness and gaiety to tbe clothing of the woman who had been the principal broadcaster for as long as they had been able to bring in a picture.

  . . ship, if any of you are really listening out there. Listen, please, any of the cities of Earth! If you will blink the lights of your city in three short flashes, any time Mars is in the sky, we will know we have communicated with you. Mare is now about fifteen degrees above the horizon to the east as seen by an observer on the east coast of North America. Mars looks like a star, but has a reddish cast and does not twinkle. If you have very good vision or optical aids you will be able to discern a slight disk, which you cannot do with any star

  "I wish she'd
get to the technical tape,” said Nonny, who had already settled down with his clipboard and pencil.

  Anna signaled for silence as the woman on Mars began the taped electronics talk—one of a series on the construction of a maser transmitter with which communication with Mars could be established. After the first few minutes all tour were leaning forward in their seats as they strained to extract every possible fact and inference. Nonny sketched each diagram as it appeared on the screen with the rapidity that was his special skill.

  In two hours the Martian tape had run. It ended, as usual, with a statement to the effect that it would be repeated for a period of seven days before the next tape in the series was begun. Only when they reached the actual point in the live explanation at which their set had been energized did they turn it off and troop back downstairs to sleep.

  Nonny shook John Castle awake after midnight. “Mr. Castle, they’re outside, right outside. I think you’d better be awake.”

  "Outside the fence, you mean." He tried to project reassurance.

  “No, sir. Inside the fence. Some on the back porch, I think. Mr. Trees and Anna are in the kitchen.”

  The kitchen was bright with candles. Japhet had lit every taper in the cupboard, positioning them on the windowsills; the fire was half smothered under a double load of fresh wood.

  Anna said, ‘I'm glad Nonny got you.” With a blanket wrapped about her shoulders and her black hair tumbling loose, she looked as fully Cherokee as some distant forebear must surely have been.

  Her brother, fully dressed as always, turned away from the back door. “They got through the fence,” he said, “and there must be a hundred of them.” He was holding an ax, the closest thing to a weapon anyone was permitted to own.

  “It always sounds like more than there are,” John said. “Just don’t do anything foolish and we’ll be all right.”

  "I couldn’t let everybody sleep, could I? Suppose one comes in through a window?”

  “You’ve got bars on the windows.” John tried to comb his hair with his fingers.

  “I had a fence too.”

  There was a scrabbling of claws on the boards of the porch outside. A wet, snuffling nose explored the crack of the door, and brought with it a fetid reek. John kicked the bottom panel. The snuffling Stopped.

  “I think we ought to make some guns,” Japhet said. He was trying to sound foresighted and responsible, but the underlying hysteria could not be concealed. “If we can make all that stuff upstairs we could make guns too.” From outside, as though he had been overheard, came a shriek of laughter.

  No one got any more sleep that night except Nonny, who between disturbances laid his head on his arms on the kitchen table. John left half an hour after dawn—after determining as well as he could by peering through the windows that their night visitors had gone. The Civic Center, where he and every other man in White City unable or unwilling to maintain his own home was compelled to live, served a breakfast free to its tenants, and he preferred not to impose on the Trees.

  It had been a dry autumn, leaving the road deep in dust where the old asphalt bad disappeared. As always when he walked, his stride lengthened as he allowed his mind to drift, with a feeling of luxury into ordered, complex fantasies of war, research, and exploration. His father had been an army officer, shuttling between Cape Kennedy and the great, half-empty pile of the Pentagon, before the suspicion of political activity had forced him to retire in exile to this rural town. Before he died John had learned from his reminiscences the glory of knowledge won in the laboratory and on the testing ground, for the armed services had been the last supporters of the Mars Stations and the space program. That lesson had never left him; he seldom tramped a road without the roar of rockets in his ears and the shout of a division behind him.

  It was country to be thoughtful in, masculine and silent. Only knowing eyes would notice once in two miles a telltale pile of chalky droppings or a pawmark in the dust of some sheltered spot. Without interrupting his thoughts he watched the margins of the road for places of probable ambush and, if his eyes could not penetrate the shadows, reversed his stick in his hands and walked wide.

  On his right Cemetery Hill marked the beginning of the town. Old marble monuments crowned the hill, leaving the lower slopes to the newer burials—mere mounds blackened in the center where relatives had built protective fires. The wrought iron fence looked impenetrable, but John recalled the morning when he had come with fresh fuel for his father's grave, and shuddered.

  At the Civic Center he found every other man in the place already seated for breakfast. That left him the end of the table farthest from the kitchen, where the platters came after everyone else had served himself, and he found himself facing the Captain down the long sweep of the board. Massively impressive in his pale blue uniform with the clusters of doves denoting his rank, the Captain had the habit of tapping his glass with the edge of his spoon before he spoke; he did so now, and thirty hungry men fell silent at the chime.

  “Mr. Castle: we missed you. We feared the loss of your erudition.” The Captain’s eyes ran slowly down the ranked men on either side of the table. “It’s hog-slaughtering time, isn’t it?” “Hog” was the current government term of opprobrium for persons thought to favor the expenditure of resources on scientific or educational “adventures.” No one at the table could miss the point.

  One of the waitresses deferentially placed a pewter tray of scrambled eggs in front of the Captain and he clashed his fork on his plate as a signal that others might speak.

  When the tray reached John it held only a few scraps and puddles of a watery yellowish fluid. He poured this over his slice of rough bread and wondered sourly how much the Captain saved from his generous Peaceguard living allowance by boarding at the Civic Center. It appeared to be a pleasant as well as a lucrative arrangement. The Captain took the best of everything in double quantity, and had only to look past his plate to find objects for his suspicions.

  A government perpetually short of revenues had discovered a means of maintaining the teachers who staffed its schools without drain on the treasury. In return for teaching physics, mathematics, and chemistry to its high-school students in the morning, it granted John Castle a local monopoly on the same subjects at adult education classes in the afternoon, permitting him to charge whatever fees he could wheedle from his students. For the use of tide school's classroom he paid a minute monthly rent.

  He looked away as Anna Trees, who steadfastly refused his offers of free tuition, handed him her worn coin. Working ten hours a day at the pottery for seventy-two cents (old style), she paid him twenty a week for chemistry and physics. Silver was harder to come by every year, but living at the Center he had little use for produce and was forced to require it from his students whenever a wave of distrust had forced the value of government scrip to zero again. Anna's dime showed no impression on either side—year and motto and President’s head all obliterated by wear.

  Eight students sat in the broad-armed writing chairs, all that remained of the September enrollment of twelve. John cleared his throat. “Today we arc going to suspend the first twenty minutes of Adult Physics One-oh-one to watch an educational broadcast from Arlington." While the classroom set was warming op, he added, "I understand that this is to be on practical mechanics.”

  The lecturer, seated comfortably behind his desk at the “temporary” capital, at least possessed a cheerful voice and a relaxed and engaging lectern personality. John had apparently switched on the talk a half-minute too late, for by the time the audio circuits became functional the lecture had clearly begun: “Thus although you may not feel the subject matter deals directly with your course of study, your course deals directly with our subject matter. A trap is in effect a machine, sometimes simple, sometimes quite complex, employed to catch or kill an animal; but even the most sophisticated traps when analyzed prove to be arrangements of levers, planes, screws, and the other classic mechanisms of mechanics.

  “Now befo
re we go into the types of mechanisms in detail l should like to review briefly the background of wildlife management in this country.”

  Someone in the class snorted.

  “Ever since the first civilized men reached our continent wildlife has been a problem to some degree. Deer ate the crops of the earliest settlers just as they do ours, and pumas and other predators raided their stock in a fashion which would be quite familiar to the modern farmer. In short, the control problem is an old problem, neither much better nor much worse today than it has been in times past.

  “There is one misconception I should particularly like to set right. About thirty years ago, as we all know, it was decided to reclaim certain strip-mined areas and utilize the lands as nature preserves. Since the ecology of central and southern Africa appeared at the time to be on the point of complete disintegration, some of those preserves were stocked with the most hardy African species in an attempt to save them from extinction.

  “Inevitably some native species invaded the African areas; and, since the average man is remarkably unfamiliar with the Other occupants of his biosphere, these came to be confused with the imported fauna. When the African preserves were discontinued the non-native varieties were destroyed or sent to zoos but the idea that certain objectionable animals are ‘foreign’ has proved harder to kill. I would like to state once, and for all that the ocelot, the baboon, the grizzly bear, the black bear, the hyena, and the puma are native to this continent, however troublesome we may find them.

  “Now here”—he held up a metal contrivance while the camera panned in—“is a most efficient type of trap. Some of you may already be familiar with the mechanism, since our grandfathers used them extensively and they are quite durable. The jaws—see the little teeth?—are set like this, so the spring cannot act until this trigger plate is depressed.” (Turning away from the set for a moment John noted that his class appeared at least mildly interested.)