CHAPTER III

Trace Roscoe had been a sergeant, off and on, for nine years. He belonged to the regular Army and had never thought of choosing any other career. Twice he had been busted to corporal and twice regained his stripes. Once he had been up for a commission and had, after due thought, refused it, because he'd known he wouldn't have it long. He had an Irish temper, and that was from his mother; he had a bulldog English muddle-through determination, and that was from his father. He was a hell of a good man in a fight. He was the best driver in his company, a better mechanic than a driver, and a better boxer than either. He read adventure novels and Von Clausewitz and Spillane and Voltaire and anything else that happened his way. He didn't consider himself much of a brain, but would have smeared the man who implied he was less intelligent than Einstein, for a man's opinion of himself should not be held by other people.

He had been driving his broadcasting truck along Highwood Avenue when the saucers attacked. He had been reciting the pap about not panicking, and hoping that he could personally see one of the single-eyed aliens sometime. He put no faith in the friendly-explorer crud. He wanted to look into that lone eye and decide for himself what the critters intended, because Trace Roscoe fancied himself a pretty good judge of character, even the character of ostrich-hoofed schmoes from outer space.

Well, the earth rose up around him and his truck before he rightly knew what was going on; and after a period of blackness he woke up to pain and a stench like one of Poe's charnel houses in his nostrils. He found that he was lying with his left arm draped over a jagged hunk of truck, clutching the mike with stiff fingers. Not being one to act without thinking in an emergency, he lay perfectly quiet and listened for a while to the rumble and crump of bombs—which he later found out had been the rays from the saucers instead—and the buzzing of his own skull. He could taste blood and feel it drying on his skin. He didn't believe he was at all badly hurt.

A little way from his face there was a busted headlight. He gazed at it a while, collecting his thoughts and opinions, and noticing that an arrangement of the shattered glass and chrome made a quite respectable mirror in which he could see a good deal of what went on behind him. Before he had decided what to do, he saw the saucer come to ground on the blasted field. He played possum and after a bit he saw the greenie come up the rise and stand there glaring around, holding the queer pennon and tipping back the pronged helmet from his eye.

Trace concentrated on holding still until the critter stepped over to him, and then Trace exploded all over the poor bastard, and took away his gun, which he wouldn't be needing any longer, and ran.

He half expected to be popped off by a bullet or a ray or a lord-knew-what from the saucer, but he reached the first edge of ruins safely and went to ground like a rabbit. Sitting in an angle of broken wall, he scanned the city. The saucers were engaged in a final mop-up. Trace felt sick. He looked at his town from end to end and he knew there couldn't be a dozen people alive in it. He had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of the world, but he made some shrewd guesses. He was aware of the incredible number of blips that had been showing up on the radar screens lately. He knew that this city wasn't important enough in the scheme of things to warrant more than a small section of the attacking forces. This must be what Revelations called "the great day of God" when good and evil fought it out at Armageddon. Except that evil seemed to be winning, hands down.

Trace Roscoe peeked over his wall at the grounded saucer, and saw that a lot of greenies were coming out of it, advancing cautiously toward their dead comrade who lay with ten feet of flag-pole sticking up from his throat. Trace counted them as an automatic action (there were seventeen), in case he would need to know how many made up a saucer's crew in the future. Then he bent low and ran from hillock to hillock through what had that morning been the south-western suburbs of his city. As he ran he discarded the holster of the alien's gun, and thrust the weapon itself into his belt. If he had had a few minutes to examine it, and had he discovered how many loads it carried, he would have remained and started a fight with the one-eyers. Running was strategically correct in view of his ignorance of his only weapon.

When he had covered a mile he got up on a one-story-high mound of rubble and looked back. The green men had planted their flag and returned to their craft; even as Trace watched, it rose like a round green bullet and disappeared above the yellow haze. None of the other saucers landed, so far as he could see. The landing, then, had been for the vainglorious purpose of leaving their banner in token of victory. Trace spat and jumped down and went on into the city.

The reek made him gag now and then, but he had smelled some god-awful things in his time and was able to control his uneasy stomach. He considered the possibility of poison gas and judged it too slight to worry over; the destroying rays had certainly no need of accompanying gases, for they were as all-destructive as a thousand hurricanes rolled up in one package.

By three o'clock—his watch, miraculously, was still going—Trace had entered the city itself. He trotted down a broken, heaped-up thoroughfare, his glance roving constantly from side to side in search of movement. A sergeant whose army was gone had to find himself another in a hurry; and if so be it he was the general in that one, well, Trace Roscoe was ready to take on the job.

He had no fanatical hope of beating the greenies, because he was a soldier and level-headed, and odds of some millions to one were no odds at all. He figured the enemy's strength at something between ten and a hundred thousand saucers, with at least twenty individuals crewing each. There were at a conservative estimate 200,000 troops on the other side; and more like 2,000,000. So Trace was not indulging in any optimism when he started hunting for an army. He was merely following his natural inclinations, which were to fight the opposition as long as he had breath in his body and hands on the ends of his arms.

He was not full of sorrow and wild regret either, for that wasn't Trace's way. Besides which, the destruction of the civilization of this earth was too big to be grasped and understood all at once. If Trace had found the bodies of a score of people, he might have burst into tears, for his heart was big and Irish and sentimental. But pacing down the stinking tomb of hundreds of thousands of men and women was so incredible as to be simply a fact and not a comprehensible horror.

Alone he stood in the middle of a more-or-less flat plain in the city, staring and listening; and when he heard the shout, he went toward it at once, exulting that so quickly he'd discovered a private, or it might be a captain, for his army. There was a hole that was floored with cracked steps and went down into the ground, and Trace dived into it without hesitation.

Sitting at the bottom, with chunks of concrete heaped around him like divot around a duffer's tee, was a thin gentleman in a mustache, half a top hat, one leg of a pair of black trousers, and little else but a scowl. "They killed her," he said as Trace came into his view. "They blew her right out of my arms."

"Can you stand?" Trace asked him, reaching out one big hand.

"I don't know. Ouch! Yes, I can," said the man. "I tell you, they murdered Fannie."

"I'm sorry, fellow. Your wife?"

"My rabbit."

"Rabbit?" Trace turned him around and looked him over for wounds; there were none more serious than extensive bruises.

"I'm a magician," said the naked man. "Blacknight the Great. I had Fannie for three years and she never made a mistake. Smartest damn rabbit you ever saw. I was carrying her to a shelter and one of those rays shot along over the Farinello Building and the whole street blew up and she was gone, just like that. Damn green monsters." He stared at the sergeant. "I suppose it seems silly to you, feeling bad about a rabbit?"

"No," Trace said shortly. "I had a marmoset once. Let's get out of here and see how many others are alive."

"I haven't heard a thing for an hour," Blacknight said. "Not until your footsteps in the gravel. I think they're all gone." The two men stood in the open, craning their necks. "Nobody," the thin man said bitterly. "Two men left out of a world. We can't even start our race again. That takes a female too. My God," he said suddenly, and put his hands over his face.

"Come on," Trace Roscoe said sharply. "I'm hungry."

The naked magician looked up at him. "In the middle of this?" he said, and then, considering, "I guess I am too. I wouldn't have thought it was possible."

Farther along they found the remains of a two-story department store; a lot of it was gone, but in the mess they managed to find a shirt and a pair of pants for Bill Blacknight—he swore it was his own name—and a couple of cans of corned beef hash. They invented a skillet and stove out of twisted metal, and shortly had wolfed down the hash and were prowling further into the city.

Trace saw the policeman first. He was walking in a tight little circle around a shattered telephone pole, waving his revolver and talking loudly to nobody. Trace sneaked up within a dozen yards before the cop spotted him. The first bullet cut his ear and the second missed, and then Trace had the gun. He tried to subdue the policeman but the poor devil was hopelessly mad. Trace shot him mercifully in the head. He took the cartridges out of the leather belt and dropped them into his shirt pocket and stuck the gun beside the alien's weapon in his belt. He and Bill Blacknight traveled on, going methodically from street to street in search of recruits.

When dusk came they had six more people. Bill told Trace that it was the damn silliest-looking excuse for an army which he could imagine. Trace shrugged. "They're human, anyhow."

"Are you sure?" Bill asked him. "Even Slough?"

"He has two eyes," said Trace, "and that's the only qualification a man needs for my army."

Slough might be called a midget. He stood exactly four feet high. He was beautifully proportioned, smoothly muscled and lithe-looking. He had a large head with a wild mane of yellow hair, and his eyes were pure Delft blue. He spoke in professorial tones and appeared entirely unaffected by the fact that his left arm was broken below the elbow. Trace set it for him, expertly and swiftly, while Slough talked quietly and with six-syllable words of the ghastly doom he hoped to see visited on the alien destroyers. He said he had been an airplane designer. He was without doubt the most intellectual member of Trace Roscoe's forces, and the only one save Bill Blacknight the magician whom Trace felt he could trust.

There were two girls, red-headed Barbara Skye who had been a secretary and couldn't seem to stop saying how awful, how awful it all was; and a dark-haired woman of twenty-five or so, who had not said a word thus far. Trace believed she was sane, but stunned into a sort of walking coma. He did not therefore consider killing her in mercy, but took her along as a potential ally.

The other three men, all office workers, looked useless; but Trace was setting out to avenge his world, and he had to accept every scrap of manpower that came his way. The three were in various degrees of shock, the worst being Johnson, who wept and shivered if you looked at him, the next Kinkaid, a plump balding man with a bad case of shudders who kept trying to run away from the little band, and the best Hafnagel, almost as big as Trace, with a tic in his cheek and fingers so rigid with nerves as to be almost useless. Johnson had had a rifle when they found him, a heavy sporting thing with four loads that he'd picked up in the rubble of a firearms shop. Trace had taken it from him and given it to Bill. Johnson had been too frightened and sick to protest.

Trace sat them down in a circle on the highest point of what had been the city, where tumbled buildings and upheaved earth made a barren hill which would never produce anything, flowers or homes, for a thousand years.... He stood among them and began to talk. His manner was that of a sergeant with a detail of raw recruits.

"Okay. There are seven of you and by and large I've seen better material, but you'll have to do. Now I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to find the green lice that did this to our country, and blast 'em. We're going to make 'em wish they'd never left Venus, or Mars or wherever the hell they sprang from."

Hafnagel, the big man with stiff hands, said something unprintable. "How, you jerk? How can you fight a flying saucer?"

Trace gave him a look that in its time had crackled the enamel on the teeth of many a GI. He said slowly, "My name is Sergeant Roscoe and I am your commanding officer and you had better remember it, Mac, or you will have cause to wish you had become extinct some years before you ever laid eyes on me. Now I shall continue. The fleet of enemy ships left here at a terrific pace between one and two o'clock this afternoon, heading in the direction of Washington, D.C. I haven't spotted one since. Therefore what we will do is pick up our flat feet and head for the capital. God knows what we'll find there, but it's a cinch we've got to get out of here plenty fast."

"Why?" asked Kinkaid, the fat one.

"For one thing, Mac, they'll not be back this way, because what have they got to come back for?" asked Trace patiently.

"All the more reason to sit right here," said Hafnagel. "We can dig enough out of the ruins to live like kings."

"Ignoring the fact that you are gonna go where I say you're gonna go," said Trace through his teeth, "let me ask you, Mac, to take a sniff of the breeze."

"The smell's bearable."

"It will get worse. By this time two days from now it'll be enough to suck the guts out of you. I needn't say why."

"Oh," said Hafnagel, his cheek twitching. "Oh, I hadn't thought—"

"Exactly. Don't try to. Just listen to me. I am your superior officer, Mac," said Trace, "and with you and these other slewfooted remnants I am going to put a crimp in them Martians—
those
Martians—that they'll feel clean to the GHQ. Now we'll take ten and be on our way. I want to clear this area before the atmosphere gets serious."

He looked at them, seven shivering people huddled from the cold into the coats, scarves and parkas they had managed to snatch before their universe had erupted into nothingness. Despair was unknown to Trace Roscoe, but a grin of wonder touched his mouth; wonder at his own temerity. He was leading these poor reluctant untrained slobs against a million or two giant bird-footed interplanetary warriors, and with about nine-tenths of his mind he expected to do some damage to them. The other tenth said to him, with the voice of his grandmother, "Och, Trace boy, it's mad you are, mad clean through to your Irish bones."

"Wirra, Grandmither," Trace said to her in his head, "it's the bloody English in me too, d'ye see, that won't let me stop sluggin' and won't admit I can be whupped; and then there's all the American of me, and ye know fine that an American never is whupped at all, at all!"

He chuckled—first time that day—and sat down to examine the alien's pistol by the flare of his lighter.