Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“Borgmanns!” muttered Ronnie bitterly. “What we need is a program that will detect and eradicate them!”

There were nods of approval all around the room.

The Colonel, puzzled by the strange word, leaned over to Anse and whispered, “Borgmanns? What the devil are borgmanns?”

“Quislings,” Anse said. “The worst kind of quislings, too, because they don’t just work for the Entities, they actively aid and abet them.”

“Doing computer stuff, you mean?”

Anse nodded. “They’re computer experts who show the Entities better ways of spying on us, and teach them how to keep our hackers out of Entity computers. Ronnie tells me that the name came from someone in Europe who was the first to break through into the Entity computer net and offer them his services. He’s the one who showed them how we can link our personal computers to their big ones so that they could order us around more efficiently.”

The Colonel shook his head sadly.

Borgmanns. Traitors. There had always those, in every era of history. Some flaw in human nature, impossible to extirpate. He filed the word away in his memory.

A new vocabulary was springing up, he realized. Just as Vietnam had produced words like “fragging” and “hootch” and “gook” and “Victor Charlie” that no one remembered now but old men like him, so, too, did the Conquest seem to be producing its set of special words. Entity. Borgmann. Quisling. Although that last one, he reflected, was actually a retread from Second World War days, recently dusted off and put back into service.

Cantelli finished his report. Ronnie now stood up and delivered his, which had to do with the Colonel’s own pet enterprise, the establishment of underground educational facilities whose purpose was to instill a passion for the ultimate rebirth of human civilization in the younger generation. It was what the Colonel called “inner resistance,” a sort of holding action, aimed at the maintenance of the old patriotic traditions, a belief in the ultimate providence of God, a determined resolve to transmit to future Americans some sense of the old-line American values, so that when we finally did get the Entities off our backs we would still have some recollection of what we had been before they came.

The Colonel was only too thoroughly aware of the irony of placing Ronnie in charge of any project that was centered around such concepts as the ultimate providence of God and the maintenance of grand old patriotic American traditions. But the Colonel didn’t have the energy to handle the work himself any more, nor did Anse seem capable of taking it on, and Ronnie had volunteered for the assignment with a hearty if somewhat suspicious show of enthusiasm. He spoke now with eloquence and zeal of what was being done by way of sending out instructional material to groups newly organized in Sacramento, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and San Diego. He made it sound, the Colonel thought, as though he believed there really was some point in it.

And there was. There was. Even in this strange new world of borgmanns and quislings, where people seemed to be falling all over themselves in their eagerness to collaborate with the Entities. You had to keep on working toward what you knew to be right, even so, the Colonel thought. Just as in that other era of hooches and fraggings and gooks and all the other fleeting terminology of that misbegotten war, there still had been sound fundamental reasons for taking action to contain the spread of imperialist Communism throughout the world, however cockeyed in actuality our involvement in Vietnam might have been.

The meeting was moving right along. The Colonel realized that Ronnie had sat down and Paul was speaking now, some item of new business. The Colonel, much of his mind still somewhere back there in 1971, glanced toward his nephew and frowned. He was noticing, as though for the first time, that Paul no longer looked like a young man. It was as if the Colonel had not seen him in many years, although Paul had lived right here at the ranch for the entire decade past. For a long while Paul had borne an astonishing resemblance to his late father, Lee, but not any more: his heavy thatch of dark hair had gone gray and eroded far back from his forehead, his smooth oval face had grown longer and become creased with deep parallel lines, as Lee’s had never been, and his eyes, once glitteringly bright with the hunger for knowledge, had lost their sheen.

How old the boy looked, how frayed and worn! The boy! What boy? Paul was at least forty now. Lee had died at thirty-nine, destined to remain forever young in the Colonel’s memory.

Paul was saying something about the latest all-points Resistance bulletin: a roster, a worldwide census, of Entities, that had been compiled by some colleague of his from his University days, when he had been a brilliant young professor of computer sciences. The colleague, who was part of the San Diego Resistance cell and whose field was statistics—the Colonel had managed to miss his name, but that didn’t matter—had over the course of the past eighteen months collected, sifted, collated, and analyzed a mass of fragmentary espionage reports from the far corners of the world and had come to the conclusion that the total number of Entities currently to be found on Earth was—

“Excuse me,” the Colonel said, finding himself lost as Paul went rattling onward with a flurry of correlatives and corollaries. “What was that number again, Paul?”

“Nine hundred, plus or minus some, as stated. You understand I’m speaking just of the big tubular kind, the purplish squid-like ones with the spots, which everyone agrees are the dominant form. We haven’t tried to come up with figures for the other two types, the Spooks and the Behemoths. Those types seem somewhat more numerous, but—”

“Hold it,” said the Colonel. “This sounds like craziness to me. How can anybody have come up with a reliable count of the Entities, when they hide in their compounds most of the time, and when there doesn’t seem to be any way of telling one from another in the first place?”

There was some murmuring in the room at that.

Paul said, his voice oddly gentle, “I’ve just pointed out, Uncle Anson, that the numbers are only approximate, the result mainly of stochastic analysis, but they’re based on very careful observations of the known movements of the dominant Entities, the traffic flow in and around their various compounds. The figure we have isn’t entirely hard and precise—I guess you missed what I was saying when I mentioned that there might well be another fifty or a hundred of them—but we’re confident that it’s close enough. Certainly there can’t be many more than a thousand, all told.”

“It took just a thousand of them to conquer the entire Earth?”

“So it would seem. I agree that it seemed like more, when it was happening. But that was evidently an illusion. A deliberately induced exaggeration.”

“I don’t trust these numbers,” said the Colonel stubbornly. “How could anybody really know? How could they?”

Sam Bacon said, in a tone just as patient and gentle as Paul’s had been, “The point is, Anson, that even if the numbers are off by a factor of as much as two or three hundred percent, there can only be a few thousand dominant-level Entities on this planet altogether. Which brings up the question of a campaign of attrition aimed against them, a program of steady assassination that will in time eliminate the entire—”

“Assassination?” the Colonel cried, aghast. He came up out of his chair like a rocket.

“Guerrilla warfare, yes,” Bacon said. “As I’ve said, a campaign of attrition. Picking them off one by one with sniper attacks, until—”

“Wait a second,” said the Colonel. “Just wait.” He was trembling, suddenly. Suddenly unsteady on his feet. He started to sway and clamped his fingers down hard into Anse’s shoulder. “I don’t like the direction in which we’re heading, here. Does any of you seriously think we’re anywhere near ready to begin a program of—of—”