Harlan Ellison - Troublemakers

He shook a fist at the emptiness beyond the saucer, and the pillar lowered into the ship.

A minute later, for the first time since it had arrived, the dirty saucer flicked! out of existence and was gone.

“That was perhaps the wrong move, General...”

The General, who had been fastened to the TV screen by some invisible linkage, tore his eyes away from the set, and whirled, glowering, on his Adjutant.

“That’s for me to worry about, Captain Alberts. I told you the military mind can solve problems by the direct method, the uncomplicated method, while these scientists dawdle and doodle helplessly.” He was speaking loudly, almost hysterically, and the Adjutant recognized relief in the officer’s tones.

“They’re on the run’” the General shouted, grinning hugely. “On the run, by George! Now, come on, Alberts, let’s get a few antiaircraft battalions out there on the desert and pick off the rest of them in this area. Wait till the President hears of this’”

They were out on the desert, the ack-ack guns sniffing at the sky, pelting the saucers from six separate batteries. They were intent on what they were doing, certain that anyone in those other ships

(and why did the Adjutant keep getting the feeling that those other ships were empty ?)

would turn tail and disappear as quickly as the dirty saucer had done an hour and a quarter before.

They had just lobbed five fast shells at a snow-white saucer with purple markings, when the dirty saucer reappeared.

Flick!

He was back, that hairy alien in the dirty, stained toga. He was back in the same spot he had vacated, almost directly above the General’s batteries.

The pillar rose, and the General watched stunned as the metal top slid off the pillar, and the alien stepped out.

He stepped onto the top of his ship, and they saw the gash in the hull had been repaired. Caulked with some sort of black sticky stuff that stuck to the alien’s clawed feet as he walked along the top of the saucer. He carried a thick, gun-like object in his hands, cradled against his massive chest.

Then he screamed something in a voice like thunder. They could hear it only roughly, for it was in a guttural tongue. Then he switched to English, and screamed again, in more detail.

The General strained his ears. His hearing had never been the best, but the Adjutant heard, it was clear to see, from the look of horror and failure and frustration on his face. Then the Adjutant dove away from the antiaircraft gun, rolled over several times, and sprinted out into the desert.

The General hesitated only a moment before following, but that was enough.

The alien turned the gun-like object on the batteries, and a roar and a flesh sent the metal screaming skyward, ripping and shredding. Bodies were flung in every direction, and a blue pallor settled across the landscape as a thirty-foot crater opened where the battery had been.

The General felt himself lifted, buffeted, and thrown. He landed face forward in the ditch, and saw his arm land five feet away. He screamed; the pain in his left side was excruciating.

He screamed again, and in a moment Alberts was beside him, dragging him away from the area of destruction. The alien was standing spraddle-legged atop his machine, blasting, blasting, scouring the Earth with blue fire.

The alien screamed in English again, and then he stepped into the pillar, which lowered into the ship once more. A few seconds later the ship flicked! away, and materialized in the sky ten miles off, above the air base.

There was more blasting. Blue pallor lit the sky for a full half hour.

The saucer flicked! and was gone. A few moments later the blue pallor-fainter yet, but strengthening all the time-was seen twenty miles further on, washing Las Vegas.

Flick! Flick! Flick!

And a dozen more saucers, dirtier than the first, materialized, paused a moment as though getting their bearings, then flicked! away.

For the next hours the blue pallor filled the sky, and it was easy to see the scouring was moving across the planet systematically.

The General’s head was cradled in his Adjutant’s lap. He was sinking so rapidly there was no hope at all. His entire left side had been scorched and ripped open. He lay there, looking up at the face of the once-dapper Adjutant, his eyes barely focusing. His tongue bulged from his. mouth, and then a few words.

Haltingly, “I...c-couldn’t hear...what he s-said, Alb-berts. W-what...did...he...say?”

The General’s eyes closed, but his chest still moved. The Adjutant felt all the hatred he had built for this man vanish. Though the blustering fool had caused the death of a world, still he was dying, and there was no sense letting him carry that guilt with him.

“Nothing, General. Nothing at all. You did your very best, sir.”

Then he realized the last “sir” had been spoken uselessly. The General was dead.

“You did your best, sir,” the Adjutant spoke to the night. “It wasn’t your fault the attendant picked us.

“All the alien said was that there were destructive pests in this parking lot, and he was one attendant who was going to clear them out even if he had to work overtime for a century.”

The words faded in the night, and only the blue pallor remained. Growing, flashing, never waning. Never.

If this next story seems a bit familiar, it’s only because an ego-drenched movie director ripped it off when I adapted it in 1965 for a segment of The Outer Limits. So I brought a lawsuit against the film company. If you perceive a striking similarity here to a movie called The Terminator, well, go rent a VHS or DVD and watch at the end, when they roll the credits, to see something interesting. So this story has two good troublemaker lessons to be learned. The first one is so obvious I’m embarrassed even to be laying it on you: violence becomes a way of life. If you think a punch in the mouth really solves any problems, pretty soon that’s the only way you can handle a problem, big or small. And finally, one day, you take a swing and someone puts out your lights for keeps. Smart is better than strong. Clever is better than clocking someone. Outthink the problem, don’t let it bench-press you into making it your problem. The other lesson is the one the Academy award-winning director should have learned (and maybe he hasn’t even learned it yet): don’t let your ego get so hungry that it leads you to act unethically because you think you’re such Hot Stuff and nobody can touch you. Don’t think the rest of the world is as stupid as you’d like it to be: somebody is always watching. Sunny Jim, know this: there is always a faster gun out there; and there are some people whom you just cannot scare, no matter how big and loud you come on.

Qarlo hunkered down farther into the firmhole, gathering his cloak about him. Even the triple-lining of the cape could not prevent the seeping cold of the battlefield from reaching him; and even through one of those linings-lead impregnated-he could feel the faint tickle of dropout, all about him, eating at his tissues. He began to shiver again. The Push was going on to the South, and he had to wait, had to listen for the telepathic command of his superior officer.

He fingered an edge of the firmhole, noting he had not steadied it up too well with the firmer. He drew the small molecule-hardening instrument from his pouch, and examined it. The calibrater had slipped a notch, which explained why the dirt of the firmhole had not become as hard as he had desired.

Off to the left the hiss of an eighty-thread beam split the night air, and he shoved the firmer back quickly. The spiderweb tracery of the beam lanced across the sky, poked tentatively at an armor center, throwing blood-red shadows across Qarlo’s crag-like features.