Gordon Dickson: Hour of the Horde

The process by which Miles was whirled away after that to the university hospital, where they left Marie sleeping, to the airport, by jet to Washington, by blue civilian sedan there to a large building which he dimly recognized as the Pentagon, and within the Pentagon to a suite of rooms more resembling a hotel suite than anything else—all this passed like the successive shapes of some bad dream. And after all the rushing was over, after he had at last been settled in the suite of rooms, he discovered that he had nothing to do but wait.

The two men who had picked him up in Minneapolis and brought him here stayed with him through the dinner hour. After the dinner cart with its load of clinking empty plates and dirty silverware had been wheeled out again, the two men watched television, with its endless parade of announcers, throughout the evening—the sound turned low at Miles’ request. Miles himself, after prowling restlessly around the room and asking a number of questions to which his guardians gave noncommittal answers, finally settled down with a pencil and some notepaper to while away his time making sketches of the other two.

He had become lost in this, to the point where he no longer noticed the murmur of the television or the passage of time, when there was a knock at his door and one of the guards got up to answer. A moment later Miles was conscious that the man had returned and was standing over him, waiting for him to look up from his sketching. Miles looked up.

“The President’s here,” said the guard.

Miles stared, then got hastily to his feet, putting his sketches aside. Beyond the guard, he saw the door to his suite standing open and a moment later heard the approach of feet down the polished surface of the corridor outside. These came closer and closer. A second later the man Miles had been watching on television earlier that day walked into the room.

In person, the Chief Executive was not as tall as he often appeared in pictures—no taller than Miles himself. Close up, however, he looked more youthful than he appeared in news photos and on television. He shook hands with Miles with a great deal of warmth, but it was something of the warmth of a tired and worried man who can only snatch a few moments from his day in which to be human and personal.

He put a hand on Miles’ shoulder and walked him over to a window that looked out on a narrow strip of grass in what appeared to be a small artificial courtyard under some kind of skylight. The two men who had been with Miles and the others who had come with the Chief Executive quietly slipped out the door of the suite and left them alone.

“It’s an honor…” said the President. He still stood with his hand on Miles’ shoulder, and his voice was deep with the throatiness of age. “It’s an honor to have an American be the one who was chosen. I wanted to tell you that myself.”

“Thank you… Mr. President,” Miles answered, stumbling a little over the unfamiliar words of the title. He burst out then in spite of the urgings of courtesy. “But I don’t know why they’d want to pick me! Why me?”

The older man’s hand patted his shoulder a little awkwardly, even a little bewilderedly.

“I don’t know either,” murmured the President. “None of us knows.”

“But—” Miles hesitated, then plunged ahead. “We’ve only got their word for everything. How do we know it’s true, what they say?”

Again the Presidential hand patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

“We don’t know,” the older man said, looking out at the grass of the artificial courtyard. “That’s the truth of the matter. We don’t know. But that ship of theirs is something—incredible. It backs up their story. And after all, they only want—”

He broke off, looked at Miles, and smiled a little apologetically.

Miles felt a sudden coldness inside him.

“You mean,” he said slowly, “you’re ready to believe them because they want only one man? Because they want only me?”

“That’s right,” said the Chief Executive. He did not pat Miles on the shoulder now. He looked directly into Miles’ eyes. “They’ve asked for nothing but one man. And they’ve shown us some evidence—shown us heads of state, that is—some physical evidence from the last time the Horde went through the galaxy millions of years ago. We’ve seen the dead body of one of the Horde—preserved, of course. We’ve seen samples of the weapons and tools of the Horde. Of course, these could have been fakes—made up just to show us. But, Miles—” He paused, still keeping Miles’ eyes locked with his own. “The best guess we can make is that they’re telling the truth.”

Miles opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, helplessly.

Finally, he got the words out.

“But,” he said, “if they’re lying…”

The President straightened. Once more he put his hand on Miles’ shoulder, in a curious touch—a touch like an accolade, as if he were knighting Miles.

“Of course,” he said slowly, “if it should turn out to be that… your responsibility might turn out to be even greater than it is.”

They stood facing each other. Suddenly Miles understood—just as in the same moment he understood that it was just this message that the other man had come personally to give him. It was clear, if unspoken, between them. Yet Miles felt a strange, angry need to bring the understanding out in the open. A need to make it plain the thing was there, like touching with his tongue, again and again, the exposed root of an aching tooth.

“You mean, if it turns out that they want to make me into something dangerous to people back here,” he said, “you want me to do something about it, is that it?’

The President did not answer. He continued to look at Miles and hold Miles’ shoulder as if he were pledging him to some special duty.

“You mean,” said Miles again, more loudly, “that if it turns out that I’m being made into something dangerous to… the human race, I’m to destroy myself. Is that it?”

The President sighed, and his hand dropped from Miles’ shoulder. He turned to look out at the grass in the courtyard.

“You’re to follow your own judgment,” he said to Miles.

A great loneliness descended upon Miles. A chilling loneliness. He had never felt so alone before. It seemed as if the President’s words had lifted him up and transported him off, far off, from all humanity into an isolated watchtower, to a solitary sentry post far removed from all the rest of humanity. He too turned and looked out at the little strip of grass. Suddenly it looked greener and more beautiful than any such length of lawn he had ever gazed upon in his life. It seemed infinitely precious.

“Miles,” he heard the older man say.

He lifted his head and turned to see the President facing him once more, with his hand outstretched.

“Good luck, Miles,” said the President.

“Thank you.” Miles took the hand automatically. They shook hands, and the Chief Executive turned and walked away across the room and out the door, leaving it open. The two Treasury agents who had picked up Miles originally came back in, shutting the door firmly behind them. They sat down again without a word near the TV set and turned it on. Miles heard its low murmur again in his ear.

Almost blindly, he himself turned and walked into one of the two bedrooms of the suite, closing the door behind him. He lay down on the bed on his back, staring at the white ceiling.

He woke suddenly—and only by his waking was he made aware of the fact that his drifting thoughts had dwindled into sleep. Standing over him, alongside the bed, were two figures that were vaguely familiar, although he could not remember ever having seen them before in his life. Slowly he remembered. They were the two figures, still business-suited, that had been shown on the television screen as he and Marie had watched the President’s broadcast in the bar. Suddenly he understood. These were the two aliens from the monster ship that overhung Earth, under a sun that they had colored red to attract the attention of all the people on the world to the coming of that ship.