Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“George,” Ben said, “you’ve been doing some reconnaissance. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve learned?”

Although no one would guess it to look at him, unshaven, shambling George Brainerd had once been an Army Ranger. His skills had immeasurably aided both Lewisville and Ben’s wartime ascent to the top of the town’s chicken-coop ladder. He was not, however, one of Ben’s acolytes. (Although George had not gotten up to offer that easy chair to the mayor, either! Reggie was squeezed between Dave and Flora on the sectional sofa.)

Now Ben’s question made George look unhappy. “Their communications equipment isn’t much better than ours. I didn’t see anything fancier than off-the-shelf shortwave. No cell phones and they haven’t set up any dishes, so my guess is that the military hasn’t launched new satellites yet. No indication of aircraft, not even a recon balloon. They may patch the lines out of Lewisville for landline service, but that’ll take time.”

“Until then,” Ben said, “we take away their radios and they’re completely isolated.”

“Sure,” said George, looking unhappier. “If we take away all of them.”

“Then we eliminate them,” Otis said.

“You mean kill them?” Flora said. “Otis, you are a bloodthirsty son-of-a-bitch.”

Otis shifted uncomfortably. “Well, probably they’d surrender long before that.”

“What do we do with them when they do surrender?” George asked. “Or if they don’t? What will the Army do when an entire battalion disappears after going to look for a downed eetee ship?”

“We could get the enemy to do the job for us,” said Otis. “We could send them into a trap. Then no one would know we were involved.”

“So,” George said, “you want to set up your fellow human beings so aliens can kill them for you?”

Silence fell on the room. Apparently even Otis felt that sounded nasty.

Then George said, “What do you think, Mr. Mayor?”

That was, Reggie knew, an appeal for his help. Reggie was flattered. And usually persuading people to a course of action was something he liked to do, something he was good at. But tonight the power of his words was far less important than their real-world consequences. When one boat was going to sink, and you didn’t know whether it would be Ben’s or the Army’s, you needed to make very certain you had a place on both boats.

He sighed audibly and rubbed his forehead. “I agree with George that you have to think about the long term. Unless we have weapons that provide a decisive advantage over the Army—that would allow us to keep the Army and everyone else out of Lewisville for the foreseeable future—all an attempt at secession will accomplish is make our situation worse.”

So far, so good. No one could accuse him either of pushing for Otis’s little revolt, or of siding with the evil invading Army. People were turning from Ben to Reggie. Ben looked sour but not yet angry.

“You want to hand them a petition?” Jim said. “We, the undersigned, protest your wholesale abuses of civil rights, the U.S. Constitution, and common decency?”

“Oh, sure,” Reggie said. “As a first step. But we need something that will make it worthwhile for them to negotiate —in earnest—instead of rounding us all up. I’ve been wondering, why is the Army spending all its resources to gather up not just every last piece of eetee salvage, but nearly every person who’s worked with it? Does anyone here believe this disease nonsense? I think instead they’re looking for something, but they don’t yet know what it is. ”

George had leaned forward and was listening intently. Flora said, “And you think that if we could figure out what that thing was, if we could find it first, it would give us an advantage in negotiations?”

“Maybe they’re searching for a key that activates the fear guns,” said Dave.

Jim objected, “We’ve been looking for it for a year and turned up squat. How do you propose we find it now ?”

His ploy was at least half working, Reggie thought. They were listening. They were beginning to think twice. Reggie the voice of reason, Reggie the idea man. When he saw George opening his mouth to add to the discussion, he even began to hope they two could convince the others to forego the uprising altogether.

But then George abruptly shut his mouth. And Otis burst out, “Reggie’s right! We force them to negotiate! We do it right away, while we still have some weapons. If we get back what they’ve taken, they’re at a disadvantage. Look: a few hundred of them, fifteen thousand of us. Ben, they can’t keep control if we don’t let them—”

“No, no,” Reggie said, “that isn’t what I was saying—” But like Otis, Jim, Dave, Todd and even Flora had turned back toward Ben. They looked to Ben to decide the fate of Lewisville.

Oh, how that burned Reggie.

And now Ben spoke. “I’ve heard some good points. We can’t throw away the lives of our men. We do have to think about the long term. But we can’t let things go on the way they’re heading. We take our weapons back, we force new terms on the Army, but no big battles. That’s not a winning proposition.”

So that was the decision. They fell to planning how they were going to break into Reggie’s warehouses. Reggie had a physical sensation of sliding uncontrollably down the hen house ladder toward the guano at the bottom. And here he had thought the Army’s arrival might make Ben a little circumspect.

To ensure his own survival, he had to get rid of Ben one way or the other. But how to do so safely? He couldn’t simply go to Colonel Fikes and report tonight’s meeting. For one thing, Reggie had made no secret of his afternoon visit to the colonel. Ben would be keeping a close eye on Reggie now.

It was amusing to imagine Ben sweating at hard labor in “indefinite quarantine,” somewhere deep in a government reservation with nothing but sagebrush and jackrabbits for a hundred miles in every direction. It was considerably less amusing to contemplate what Ben might do to avoid such a fate. A bullet, say, speeding into Reggie’s back from out of the shadows. Such things had happened in the last year.

At last Ben concluded the meeting by saying, “Now, folks, we’ve got to be off the streets before curfew. Be careful going home.”

Reggie left with George through the back door. Jim Hanover followed them. They skulked along the shadows between Paula’s raspberry patch and the Fortescues’ pole beans. Far away, a coyote yipped into the chill of evening.

“Good try,” George said to Reggie in a low voice.

Wondering why George had suddenly dropped his opposition to the ridiculous plan, Reggie glanced back at him. That was why, framed in Paula’s candlelit kitchen window, he saw Ben and Otis talking. Otis appeared to be very excited. So Ben had a second, secret plan, one catering to Otis’ enthusiasms.

“It wasn’t good enough,” said Reggie.

George went his own way, but Jim followed Reggie silently home, saying goodbye only at Reggie’s front door. Jim’s own darkened house stood across the street. Jim would now, Reggie thought, keep watch through his windows. Another of Ben’s deputies was no doubt already guarding Reggie’s back door.

Annoyed, but not wanting to argue in the hearing of the security guard, Anna King buzzed George Brainerd into the morgue corridor. George was discreet and sympathetic to her work. But she preferred no witnesses, and no interruptions.