Robert Sheckley - Alien Harvest

Stan's breathing was laboring, he could hardly drag himself along. When was the royal jelly going to kick in? Julie and Gill helped him all they could, but they needed to keep their hands free to use their weapons. Because now more and more aliens were appearing, coming out of different turnings in the tunnels. They came in ones and twos, no mass attack yet, but it was probably only a matter of time.

It was clear that the suppressors were no longer doing their job. Stan, Julie, and Gill had to be constantly on the alert, because the creatures were attacking silently, suddenly springing out of the shadows.

Julie was leading the way. Her searchlight beam probed ahead into the profound darkness. She thought she had never seen such darkness before. Even the darkness she saw when she closed her eyes was not as deep as this. This was the darkness of evil, the darkness that cloaked a place where unspeakable creatures performed horrifying rituals. This was the darkness of childhood terrors. This was the darkness out of which monsters swarmed, the place where they tortured little children, and ate them, and then spit them up to make them live again so they could kill them anew.

Glancing back, Julie saw Gill falling back to help Stan, fighting half turned around to keep the aliens from running up their backs. He showed no expression when the searchlight beams occasionally illuminated his long, serious face. The android did his work methodically, but then he wasn't really human, it was all the same to him, he had no feelings, not really. He'd act just the same if he were on an assembly line screwing down machine parts. He's lucky , Julie thought, because it's not all the same to me, no matter how hard I try to make it so .

And Stan? In a way he was lucky, too. Too exhausted to care any longer, and in too much pain, to judge from his twisted features and the sweat that dripped from his face. She felt so sorry for him, and yet, in a way, she envied him. He was too far gone to feel the terror that engulfed her mind and turned her legs to jelly.

Gill plodded along, an efficient machine doing what it was supposed to do. His peripheral vision was enormously extended, and when he caught movement at the outer edges, he wheeled and fired in a single economical movement. When a group of three or more aliens came at him, he switched to the small thermite bombs he carried in a pouch on his left side, setting the proximity fuse with his thumb just before he let them go.

It was like a dance — turn, swing, fire — the only dance he had ever done. Turn, wheel, extend the arm. Boom! Blam ! Turn again, gracefully duck, turn, fire, fire again, then go forward….

He heard Stan gasp and slip. Gill scooped him up and put him back on his feet. “Can you go on?”

“Yes. Thanks …” Stan was saving his breath.

Gill was worried about the doctor. That dose of pure royal jelly hadn't seemed to help any. He knew how much Stan had been expecting to find some sort of divine elixir that would cure his cancer. Gill had no particular hope that this would happen. It was illogical. The royal jelly was not a cure; it served merely to diminish the pain. Why should a pure strain do more than the other, adulterated strains?

He knew that humans liked to entertain far-fetched notions. All of the humans, in a way, were like those Spanish conquistadores he had learned about during his hypnopaedic learning sessions, those men in armor who had painfully trekked across the American plains, searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola, imaginary places that had never existed outside the dreams of mythographers.

Stan's belief in a cure for his disease was like that. It was forlorn, even silly. No android would be capable of such folly. Yet Gill didn't think that made him better than Stan. Quite the contrary, it made him subhuman, because he could not participate in the delusions, both the pathetic and the sublime, that made the human race what it was.

The aliens were massing behind them. Gill had to slow down more and more to flight rearguard actions.

Julie pressed on ahead, hoping that the turns she took were leading them toward the outside of the hive rather than deeper into it.

Gill switched the plasma rifle to automatic fire and laid down a sheet of flame as half a dozen aliens came crawling out of a pit and, rearing to their feet, loped toward him.

Stan stumbled and fell, and lay still. Gill scooped him up and draped him over one shoulder, leaving one arm free to aim and fire the heavy plasma rifle.

By now the aliens were coming from side turnings as well as from behind. The little party wasn't surrounded yet, but it looked imminent. Gill threw his last thermite grenade, shifted Stan higher onto his shoulder, and noted that the charge in the plasma rifle was almost depleted. He turned, ready to fight to the end.

Then Julie cried, “There's light ahead! We're almost out of it!”

Gill turned and saw the faintest glimmer of grayness penetrating the profound gloom of the hive. He let go of the depleted plasma rifle and pulled a chemical slugthrower out of a side pouch. Four quick shots blasted a close-packed group of aliens with high explosives. Then Gill turned and ran, with Stan on his shoulder, toward the light.

His feet slid on the hard-packed clay of the tunnel's floor, and then suddenly he was out of the hive and into the sepulchral gray light of AR-32.

Behind him he heard Julie say, “Get out of the way, Gill.”

He managed to stagger a few steps farther. This gave Julie a chance to reset her plasma gun to full heat. She held it steadily, hosing the entrance to the hive through which they had come.

It took Gill a moment to understand what she was doing. Then he put Stan down, rummaged in his pouch, and found a plasma-rifle refill. He reloaded and swept the spot where Julie was beaming.

The beams glittered and coruscated on the hive face. The aliens were forced back, deeper into the cave, to wait until the noise and heat died down.

But Julie had something else in mind. She kept on firing until, with a sudden thunderous roar, the cave mouth collapsed. A cloud of dust and smoke arose, and then it was quiet.

Julie turned off her weapon, as did Gill. “That'll do it for a little while,” she said. “Until they find another exit from the hive,” Stan said.

“Well, it's better than nothing. Now, where in hell are we?”

Stan pointed. “You've done a great job, Julie. Look down there.”

Julie looked, and saw, less than a hundred yards away, the squat hull of the harvester.

“Now we're getting somewhere!” she said. “We just have to get aboard.”

“Yes,” said Gill. “But there's a difficulty.” He pointed again.

It took Julie a moment to see it. But then she saw the small black dots moving at the base of the hive. She could finally make them out: aliens! They had found another exit from the hive sooner than she expected. And they were blocking the way to the harvester.

She asked, “What now, Stan?” But Stan was unconscious again.

Julie and Gill looked at each other, then glanced up as a shadow crossed them.

It was a ship. For one moment Julie's hopes flared. But then she took in the ship's markings and design, and a great despondency came over her. That was not the Dolomite . That was the Lancet , commanded by Potter, the Bio-Pharm man. It hovered in the air, and nothing about it stirred. It seemed obvious to Julie that Potter was going to let them die here, watching and maybe videotaping their final agonies.

Stan revived and sat up. “The harvester, did you say?”

“It's right down there.” Julie pointed.

Stan looked and nodded. He struggled to his feet. “We've got to get there. From there, something may be possible.”