Free The Best of Joe Haldeman by Jonathan Strahan, Joe W. Haldeman Page A

never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.
     
    Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.
     
    “Movement!”
     
    “Movement!”
     
    “Jesus Chri—there’s one right—”
     
    “HOLD YOUR FIRE! f’ shit’s sake don’t shoot!”
     
    “Movement.”
     
    “Movement.” I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.
     
    Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.
     
    The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.
     
    “All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. Don’t make any quick gestures.... Anybody got a headache or anything?”
     
    “Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.
     
    “They’re trying to say something...I can almost...no, just...”
     
    “All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re...well , funny. They’re not afraid.”
     
    “You mean the one in front of you isn’t—”
     
    “No, the feeling comes from all of them, they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”
     
    “Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.”
     
    “Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.”
     
    “Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”
     
    “Yeah.”
     
    “The Taurans’ve been here at least a year—maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these...overgrown teddybears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back—”
     
    “I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they want to.”
     
    “Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ‘em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be careful.”
     
    I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.
     
    “Okay, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”
     
    I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us surrounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious they weren’t going to tire out.
     
    We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.
     
    Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after