Gérard Klein: The Overlords of War

Now imagine that this animal is endowed with intelligence at least equal to the human, reflexes more rapid than a missile’s, a cold cruelty, and implacable hatred for any creature unlike itself.

And you have a faint conception of a Monster.

It could control about seven seconds’ worth of local time, either forward or back. It could snatch from the future a scrap of the cosmos and hurl it a few seconds into the past, or vice versa. And foresee what was going to happen a few moments before it actually did, at least for an unsighted observer such as a human being.

Hence its sudden attack aboard the spaceship. The Monster had known before men or their machines did when the Urian fleet, or the ground batteries, or the accident, would intervene. It had pinpointed with adequate accuracy the picosecond when the bars of its energy cage would be weakened. It had hit out at the right moment, and won.

Or lost. It was a matter of your point of view.

Uria was the Monster’s destination, in any case. After thirty years of fruitless struggle against the Urian Empire, the Solar Powers had devised a tactic which ought to humble those haughty princes. More precisely, ten years earlier they had chanced on an “ally” which had cost them a space fleet, plus a number of individual ships, plus a naval base, plus a planet that had had to be evacuated, plus a system that had had to be embargoed, plus a lot of casualties. Just how many was a state secret. Without actually intending to, they had experimented on a grand scale with the effects of what was for the time being the Ultimate Weapon.

Assignment: to unleash on a planet of the Empire, preferably the capital world, the worst disaster in the whole of history. Condition: to escape infringing the terms of the Armistice which had ended the hot phase of the war and had been tacitly observed by both sides for twenty years. Method: set the Monster down at a prescribed point on Uria, without being spotted, and let the beast get on with it.

Six months from now, it would give birth to about eighteen thousand of its kind. A year later at most, the capital of the Urian Empire would be panic-stricken. The Princes of Uria would have to overcome their reluctance and appeal to the Solar Powers for help in getting rid of the Monsters, and then in reconstruction. For five or six thousand years that had been the inescapable conclusion of all wars; the victor would rebuild for the vanquished… after his own fashion.

Mistake to avoid: giving away the origin of the Archimedes. If the Princes of Uria were able to prove that the Monster had been turned loose by a Solar ship, the Powers would have some difficulty in arguing their case before the Galactic Congress. They might even risk being put under interdiction.

Interdiction: an immediate end to all interstellar traffic, confiscation of merchant ships found outside national space, destruction on sight of vessels of war, outlawry.

Duration: permanent.

For all these reasons the Archimedes had been on a suicide mission. From that standpoint it had been a complete success, barring the survival of George Corson. Not a scrap of the ship remained which would allow it to be identified. The Princes of Uria would be compelled to admit that the Monster might have arrived at their capital world aboard a ship of its own. Only the Terrestrials knew the exact coordinates of its planet of origin and just how puny were the present technological abilities of its species. The sole clue which might allow the Princes of Uria to work out the Monster’s provenance was now Corson himself. If the natives managed to capture him they would have solid proof of Earth’s guilt. The logical solution was suicide. He was satisfied of that. But he lacked the means to destroy himself completely. Granted, the Monster would tear him to shreds, but the traces remaining on the ground would be plenty to convince the Galactic Congress. No abyss on the planet would be so deep that a spoor could not be followed to his body. The only chance Corson had of remaining unidentified lay in staying alive.

At all events, the Monster had been delivered safely.

The night protected Corson from the Monster, whose eyes could not detect infrared or even red, though they saw well enough in the ultraviolet. It was capable of finding its way about in the dark by using sonar frequencies, but it was far too preoccupied with self-pity to bother about tracking him down.

He was trying desperately to work out the nature of the beast’s distress. He was virtually certain that Monsters experienced no counterpart of fear. On their mother world no enemy was known that could seriously endanger their lives. Unacquainted with defeat, they doubtless had never imagined an opponent more powerful than themselves before meeting humans. The only limit on their expansion was imposed by hunger. They could not reproduce except when there was an adequate surplus of food. Without it, they remained sterile. One of the chief problems the biologists from Earth had encountered in accomplishing their project had been how to get the Monster gorged.

Corson could not believe, either, that the creature was hungry or cold. Its metabolism was capable of drawing sustenance from most organic substances and many minerals. The rich pastures of Uria would furnish it with a splendid diet. The climate distantly resembled the most hospitable regions of its mother world. The composition of the air was different, but not so much so as to worry a being which, as experiment had shown, could without apparent harm endure vacuum for hours on end or wallow in sulphuric acid.

And mere loneliness was unlikely to affect the Monster. Experiments which consisted in turning loose Monsters on barren asteroids to study their behavior had indicated how little store they set by the company of their own kind. Given that they were capable of congregating for tasks that exceeded the abilities of an individual, or to play, or to exchange the spores containing their gene equivalents, it nonetheless seemed that they were in no sense sociable.

No, none of his ideas fitted. The voice of the Monster made him think of the cries of a child shut up by mistake or for punishment in a dark closet, feeling himself lost in a vast, unfathomable, terrifying universe full of nightmares and hallucinations, caught in a trap from which he cannot escape by himself. Corson wished he could explain the nature of the trap. But that was impossible. Throughout the voyage he had tried to establish contact with the Monster. He knew it was susceptible to various types of argument, but he had fared no better than his predecessors when trying to carry on a conversation with it. There was one obvious cause: the implacable hostility the Monster displayed toward humans. Why this should be so, no one knew. It might be a matter of smell, color, sound… The biologists had tried many ways of deceiving the Monster, all in vain. Its tragedy was that it was too intelligent to be misled by tricks played on its instinctual reactions, and not intelligent enough to identify and tame the mindless powers snarling within which made it good for nothing but to kill.

Having tried a few steps forward, and stumbled, then continued on his knees for some hundreds of meters, Corson, worn out, decided to drowse without entirely relaxing his vigilance. He started awake again after what felt like only a few minutes. His watch told him he had slept for four hours. It was still night. The Monster had fallen silent.

A thick cloud must be crossing the sky, for the stars had vanished from a whole area to his left. It was moving rapidly. It had a sharply defined edge. A huge object, doubtless a flying machine of a type he had never heard of despite having studied all the engines of war employed by the Princes of Uria, was passing soundlessly overhead. It was hard to guess at its height or speed because it was so difficult to see clearly. But when it was directly above him, its black outline on the heavens swiftly grew larger and he just had time to realize that it was going to crush him.