Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

By now the soldiers knew something was wrong and they were scrambling for cover. The townspeople saw their chance and scattered. Ran for the woods. A few charged the soldiers and tried to seize weapons. Fights and shooting erupted everywhere. I did what I could, evening the odds where possible.

Within a few minutes, the town had cleared out. Troops, natives, everybody. They left behind a lot of bodies, both townspeople and in uniform.

I got back into the lander and closed the hatch and just sat. “ You know, ” George said, “ while you were out there joining in the mayhem, I could have invoked the emergency provisions and taken the lander back into orbit. ”

The possibility had never occurred to me. “I know,” I said.

“ But you trusted me? Why didn’t you disable the connector? ” What was he talking about?

“I assumed,” I said, “you knew if you left me you’d be putting me in danger, and you wouldn’t want to do that.”

It was the right answer. “ That’s very good, Art. Absolutely right. And the corollary to that line of reasoning is that I have your welfare at heart. ”

I was getting tired being lectured by software. But I let it go. “I will continue to trust you.”

“ I hope you are making the correct judgment. ”

I better be. If my life depended on disabling the connector, I had a serious problem.

We found a burned-out village and went down. Bodies were everywhere. A few survivors wandered around in a state of shock. They cried out and flung their arms about their heads in despair. I tried to help, getting water, helping put out a fire. I had to be careful, of course. I got more clips, including a riveting segment in which a handful ofsurvivors, mostly young ones of both sexes, swore vengeance against the attackers.

We were everywhere that night. In a moderately sized city on the shore of a large lake, I took pictures of corpses and hysterical children and recorded the arrival of a band of Noks who came to help. I sent everything to McCarver. Here’s more, Paul. Here are several hours of cultural development, helped along by our neutrality. Maybe we need to send them some pious maxims.

Cathie got on the circuit.

“Did you see the clips?” I asked her.

“ I saw them. ” She was silent, obviously trying to phrase what she wanted to say. Finally: “ Art, you’ve got to stop. ”

“Did McCarver tell you to try to get me to behave?”

“ No, ” she said. “ Paul hasn’t said anything to me about you. ”

Another long silence. “ But the conflict down there is global. You can’t stop it. You’re only one man. You can’t really do any good. All that’s happening is that you’re throwing your career away. Art, they will prosecute you. They’re really getting upset. ”

“Oh. Well, hell, Cathie, I wouldn’t want to upset anybody.”

Over the next few days I waged war against whatever military forces I could. I poured sand in the gas tanks of transport vehicles, cut a dirigible loose from its tether, and set another one afire. I boarded ships, stole lubricants from the engine rooms and poured them into gun barrels. I blew up ammunition depots and even disrupted a parade by seizing someone’s weapon and firing shots into the air.

Everywhere I went, I made a visual record. Not only of the dead and dying, but of the grieving survivors. And the celebrating killers. The trouble on the Sheldrake and back home where they made up the ground rules was that nobody believed the Noks qualified for the rights that humans took for granted. They were just not at our level. They had no feelings. Were incapable of governing themselves. I wondered what the Noks, when they learned of our presence, would think about us ?

I stopped answering calls from McCarver. George got sulky and went silent, speaking only in response to questions.

When I got lonely, I called Cathie. She no longer pleaded with me to stop. Just told me she hoped everything would turn out all right. On the day I broke up the parade with the rifle, she told me the boss had asked her to pass along a message he’d received. “I doubt it’s anything new,” I said.

“ It just came in this morning. It’s from Hutchins. ” The Academy’s director of operations. Back in Arlington.

“Okay. Let’s see it.”

The director was sitting in her office. Dark hair, dark eyes. Wouldn’t look half bad if she smiled once in a while. “ Paul, ” she said, “ I know you’ve already informed Kaminsky he’s in violation of at least a half-dozen laws, and God knows how many regulations. We want him to stop what he’s doing immediately. He is to return to the Sheldrake and remand himself to your authority. As soon as convenient, ship him home. Let him know that charges are being drawn up at this moment. But that if he complies I will do what Ican for him. ”

“Sure she will. She’ll commute the sentence to life.”

“ Give it up, Art. ”

“I’m surprised McCarver and his people haven’t come after me.”

“ They would if they could, but you keep moving around. They haven’t been able to get a fix on you. ”

“Why don’t they just ask George?”

“ You shut him down, didn’t you? ”

“No. I wouldn’t be able to pilot the lander without him.”

“ That’s interesting. He stopped talking to us. On his own, looks like. ”

“I’m surprised to hear that. You mean he’s not reporting everything I do to McCarver?”

“ No. We get nothing from him. ”

George wanted no credit for his actions. “ You got me into this. You’ve compromised me. But of course I said nothing. If I had they would have taken you back to the Sheldrake and sent you home. And prosecuted you. That’s why I stopped reporting. I was hoping you’d come to your senses, apologize, and go back voluntarily. That way they might consider being lenient. ”

“George, I appreciate what you did.”

“ It doesn’t mean I approve. ”

A planetary surface is a big place. The mission didn’t have the kind of equipment necessary to track me from orbit. But Cathie had left no doubt they were watching. I took what precautions I could. I started wearing Intek goggles, which would allow me to see anyone else wearing a lightbender. I never stayed long in one place. And I began limiting my transmissions to the ship. Sent them out in batches, usually just before we moved on. On the whole, I made a pretty decent fugitive while simultaneously raising hell with the various Nok militaries. Not bad for a guy who had no experience at that sort of thing.

We were getting low on food. I’d begun to cut rations. When I got down to where there was a three- or four-day supply left, George asked when I was going to give it up. “ The crusade’s about over, ” he said.

Yep. We were looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. “What’s the maximum sentence for what we’ve been doing?” I asked George.

“— What we’ve been doing? ”

“Yeah.”

“ I like that. Anyhow, it looks like a maximum of five years. Plus fines. ”

“Big ones?”

“ They’d buy a nice place on the Riviera. ”

It was early morning where we were, on the west coast of the largest continent on the planet, but for me it was midday. I’d just set fire to a fuel supply depot, a particularly heavy blow on a world with serious energy problems. “Five years,” I said.