Zone Yellow

Prologue

I decided to walk home from the big affair at the Richtofen palace; it was a mild evening for Stockholm in September, and I needed the exercise. When I turned off Strandvagen to take a shortcut via Styrmansgatan, I heard something behind me. I looked back, not feeling alarm, just mild curiosity. I caught only a glimpse of a tall, oddly narrow-shouldered figure wrapped to the ankles in a drab overcoat, just as he ducked into a side alley. That made me more curious. I went back as if casually, and as I reached the doorway, he literally fell on me. I threw him back and got a glimpse of an ugly, buck-toothed, chinless face just as he fell over sideways, and lay on the cobbles, moving feebly. I realized he really had fallen on me. He was wounded, or sick. I went to one knee to feel for a pulse. What I felt was a wiry wrist with a pelt like a terrier. I rolled him on his back; he had a rank rats-in-the-barn smell to him, plus a stink like rotten oranges. His clothes under the coat consisted of a closely-fitted coverall made of a woolly material. His long, deformed feet were in high-top shoes or low boots of a soft, wrinkled reddish leather. There was short fur on his shins.

His pockets were empty. The hair on the back of my neck was prickling, Nature’s way of making me look bigger, to scare off predators. The rat-man’s beady eyes were open and he was looking at me with an expression which, had he been human, I’d have called appealing. He mumbled something, all vowels and squeaks, ending with a moan. The light went out of the eyes. He was dead. A big, bristly Norway rat came scuttling along the alley, halted, sniffed, started around the dead creature, changed his mind and ran for it. I left the narrow alley and went back out to Strandvagen, where a mercury-vapor lamp shed a ghoulish light on the elegant facades facing the harbor and glittered on the choppy water. I saw a taxi with its cheery orange light on, and started toward it. The time of a leisurely stroll was past. I needed to get to HQ, Kungliga Spionage, ASAP.

When I was ten feet from the taxi, the cabby glanced at me, then gunned away from the curb and left me standing in a cloud of burnt-kerosene fumes. Stockholm’s cabbies are known for their courtesy and helpfulness; something was bothering that fellow. I watched him speed across Gustav-Adolphstorg and into Tunnelgatan.

Just then, two men ran out of another side street. Well-dressed middle-aged Swedes don’t jog around the city streets after dark. But these two were coming at full tilt, and there was another man running behind them, not chasing them, but fleeing from whatever had spooked the first two. Then a whole crowd burst from the narrow street, and I could hear the mob-roar coming from them. Some of them were bleeding from small wounds. They looked like a routed army. They kept coming, right past me, men and women and kids, all running hard, with terrified expressions on their faces. I went out to try to intercept one fellow, but he gave me a wild-eyed look and veered out around me. Over by the stone facade of an eighteenth-century ship’s chandler something caught my eye, standing in a doorway: a tall, narrow figure like a six-foot, dull-olive cigar with feet and a turned-up collar. I felt panic grab at my throat and choked off the yell that I had spontaneously started to utter. Before I could so much as grab somebody and point out the stranger, I saw another one―then another. All three were simply standing in shadowy doorways. They were too tall, too narrow, with only feet showing beneath the long coats, and short, insignificant-looking arms with the hands tucked into high-set pockets. They were exactly like the ratty fellow who’d died in the alley. I didn’t know why, but there was something indescribably ominous about these silent, unmoving fellows.

I stepped into a doorway. The last stragglers of the panicked mob had pushed on by. I looked down the side street they had come from and saw something that made my heart sink: a crowd of the overcoated intruders, coming on at a run, running awkwardly, but amazingly swiftly, leaning forward at a perilous angle, their stubby legs twinkling below their long coat-skirts. One stumbled and fell and the rest flowed over him, leaving a shapeless heap behind. Then one turned back and ran to his fallen comrade and bent over him.

It took me a moment to realize he was eating him.

The last few stragglers―I had stopped thinking of them as men―were having trouble keeping up, and tended to extend their arms and drop to all fours. If they were trying to overtake the mob, they didn’t succeed, but they kept on coming, dozens, scores of them. They streamed past me without noticing me.

Then one fellow dropped out and scuttled over to a fire escape, which he went up, to the first landing, without slowing down. He stopped there and fumbled inside the drab coat and brought out something that I knew at once was a weapon, though it looked more like a wad of wire coathangers. He set himself and aimed it down across the torg, just above the last group of people, and a blue bolt of lightning slammed into the weathered stonework of the building above and ahead of them, and chunks of rock fell in their path, not quite blocking it. The mob skirted the obstruction, leaving behind three casualties writhing on the cobbles.

I eased out my old Walther 6.35, took aim, and put a round into the midsection of the shooter. He doubled over the rail and fell, twisting in midair. He hit hard, but his fellow whatever-they-weres went over or around him and left him there. Suddenly the plaza was empty, except for the casualties.

One of the three people injured by the falling stones had gotten to his feet and was exploring himself to find out how badly he was hurt. I went over to him. He gave me a startled look, but held his ground. He was a sturdy-looking young fellow in what looked to me like shore-clothes. He said, “What the heck!” (Yes, “heck”; Swedes don’t swear much.)

“How badly are you hurt?” I asked him.

He shook his head vaguely. “What happened?” he continued. “I was running―”

“Why?”

“The rat-men,” he said. “Didn’t you see them? Everybody was running and I didn’t have any better idea, so I joined in.” He touched his left arm. “Just a broken arm, it appears,” he diagnosed. He looked at the middle-aged woman and the elderly man lying on the pavement beside us, bloody. Both were dead.

“They weren’t so lucky,” he commented. He glanced at the reddish stone fragments, then looked up at the wound on the store-front. “Artillery fire. Who―?” He broke oif and gave me a hard look. “You’re not running,” he accused. “Friends of yours?”

I knew he meant the rat-men; I denied it, and pointed to the one I’d shot. “He was the one who dropped the rocks on you,” I told him. He nodded and went over toward the dead creature. The light of the street lamps was wan in the colorless stone plaza, surrounded by drab age-worn facades. His feet echoed. Otherwise the silence was complete, except for some yells in the distance. My eye fell on a handbill stuck on the lamppost: Satt in på blodbanken. Du kan sjalv behdver ta ut (Deposit in the bloodbank. You might need to make a withdrawal). That harmless exhortation suddenly had a personal and ominous meaning for me. I went on to where the man with the broken arm was looking down at the dead thing, wrapped in its dowdy coat. He rolled it on its back, or tried to; its long, slinky build wouldn’t let it stay put. It flopped back to its half-curled position on one side.

“This thing is not human,” he remarked, sounding shocked. He flipped the coat open, exposing a sort of body-stocking of the same mousey color as the wool coat. The arms, which we could see clearly now, were abnormally short and stubby, and the hands were like bones covered with pinkish leather, talon-tipped.

“You called them ‘rat-men,’ ” I reminded him.

He sniffed and nodded. “I’ve smelled enough ship-rats to recognize the stink,” he grunted. “Look here,” he went on urgently. “This has to be reported to the authorities.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “I was on my way to Imperial Intelligence.”

“Why them?” he wanted to know. “Why not the police?”

“It’s only a block or two,” I countered. “And the cops wouldn’t know any more about this than we do. I think it’s an item for Net Surveillance.”

“You mean that spook outfit that explores ‘alternate realities’ or something?”

“Certainly.” I confirmed the obvious. “And in this case a very distant one, where the primates lost out to the rodents back in the Cretaceous.”

“I’m just a simple nuclear engineer,” my new friend objected. “I don’t know anything about all that ‘Net’ business―and the little I do know, I doubt! ‘Alternate worlds,’ hah! One is enough! It doesn’t make sense, from an engineering viewpoint!”

“Then the viewpoint needs work.”

“It doesn’t work,” he stated, like a fellow getting set for a pub debate. “If there are alternate realities, we’d be surrounded by them, and if they differed from one A-line to its neighbor if only in some detail, like, in one the ship sank, and in another it reached Iceland―” (I realized he’d read more about the Net than he was letting on) “―they’d have the same technology you say we have, and our analogs would be swarming all over the place, running into each other―or even themselves!”

I shook my head, “No, because the Net technology involves meddling with the basic energies that generate what we think of as reality―”

“Think of, hell!” he cut in. “Reality is reality; not a matter of opinion!”

“Is yesterday ‘reality’?” I asked him. He started to give a quick answer, but paused instead, and I said, “ ‘Tomorrow’?”

He frowned at me. “Ja visst!” he said uncertainly. “It’s just that yesterday is past and tomorrow hasn’t happened yet.”

“What about now?” I hit him with next.

“No doubt about it!” he stated flatly, still frowning as he looked down at the dead thing at our feet. “I think,’’ he amended.

“The present moment,” I pointed out, “is merely the intersection of the past and the future; it has no temporal dimension. Everything is in either the past or the future, like a sheet of paper cut in two: every molecule of paper is in one half or the other.”

“What’s that got to do―?” he began.

I waved that away. “Maxoni and Cocini were lucky, in our continuum. Amazingly lucky. They didn’t blow our line out of existence. In all the nearby lines, they did, or they failed completely, so we’re not bumping into our alternate selves bent on the same errand. Though I did meet my alter ego once in a place we call Blight-Insular Two.

“It’s a region where the experiments went awry,” I told him, “it dissolved the temporal fabric so as to destroy causality, disrupt the regular entropic flow, and so on. Disasters of every kind befell the affected lines. But there are a couple of surviving islands in the Blight. More or less normal lines very close to and similar to this, the Zero-zero line.”

He nodded, not as if he was convinced. “How do you happen to know about all this?” he thought to ask.

“I’m Colonel Bayard of Imperial Intelligence. I’ve been in some of those A-lines. Crossed the Blight more than once. I assure you it’s true. This Stockholm―” I glanced across the plaza at the solid, real, clearly-the-only-one-of-its-kind city. “Stockholm Zero-zero―is only one of a literally infinite manifold of parallel universes, each differing from the adjacent lines in perhaps no more than the relative positions of two grains of sand on the beach―or even of two molecules within one grain of sand. Don’t worry, your analogs in the closely adjacent lines are just as sure as you are that what my analogs are telling them is nonsense.”

“You mean…”he stammered, the dead thing at his feet forgotten, “that I―that there are―?” He couldn’t quite say it. It was understandable: he was just a normal citizen, who’d heard vaguely of Net Operations, without ever really boning up on the subject, any more than the average citizen pokes into the details of space technology.

“Exactly,” I told him. “As choices between alternatives come up, both occur; the lines split, and each probability-line carries on independently. When you last had to make a decision at a crossroads, you went both ways―and on to separate destinies. So did everybody else. The amount of difference that develops depends on the time since the Common History date. I spent some time in one of the lines where Napoleon won at Waterloo. C.H. date 1815.”

“But . . . how―?” He couldn’t seem to complete a sentence, but I understood; I had felt the same way, all those years ago when poor Captain Winter had grabbed me off the street a few blocks from here and told me the same crazy story.

Since then I’d learned to accept it, even become a part of the organization that maintained surveillance over the vast continuum of worlds opened up by the M-C drive, which enabled us to move at will across the lines. The drive is the basis for the Imperium itself, the government centered here at the Zero-zero coordinates of the Net, maintaining peace and order among the lines.

I resumed my explanation. “There were many Net-traveling lines, of course, those very close to the Zero-zero, where Maxoni and Cocini had perfected their strange device without incurring the disaster that had created the Blight―”

“I’ve heard of ‘the Blight.’ ” My new pal broke in on my explanation. “Some kind of desert, isn’t it, where everything’s gone wrong?”

“That’s putting it mildly. The energies involved in the drive are the same ones that power the eternal creation/destruction cycle of reality. If they’re not tightly channeled, chaos results: cinder worlds where all life was destroyed when the suns exploded; hell-worlds of radiation and earthquakes, and even worse, lines where life went awry, and great masses of protoplasm, some human, grow like immense tumors, spreading across the land, or where horribly mutated plants and animals engage in a never-ending struggle to eat each other―all the way down to pleasant places you’d mistake for home, except that the United Colonies were absorbed by Spain in 1898. Or perhaps where the Kaiser formed an alliance with his cousins Czar Alexander and King Edward the Seventh, destroyed the French Republic, and restored the Bourbon dynasty in 1914. Or even a line where you missed a streetcar and never met your wife and went on to become a world-famous movie star, or―”

“I understand,” he cut me off. “I mean, I don’t understand, but―” His eyes went to the sprawled animal in the overcoat. “How could a thing like this exist?”

“Way back,” I guessed, “the Cretaceous, the beginning of the Age of Mammals, our small, shrewlike progenitor apparently lost the competition for the tree-habitat to the smaller rat-like critters, and a hundred million years later, this”―I prodded the corpse with my foot―”is the result.”

“But how did it get here? By the way”―he interrupted himself to thrust out a hand to me, as if he felt a sudden need to reestablish contact with the human race―”I’m Lars Burman. I was just on my way home, and…” He let that one die, too. I shook his hand.

“His species clearly has a drive like the M-C,” I said. “Why he’s here, so far from his native climes, is a tough one. He’s not alone, you know. I saw a mob of at least a hundred or so; this fellow fell out to do some killing and got himself killed.”

“How did he—?” Lars interrupted himself as usual. “You said he brought the stones down on me.

I picked up the weapon he’d used, a hybrid of a bent coathanger and a compound crossbow, with exposed wiring, and no clear indication of which was the business end. I showed it to Burman.

“With this,” I told him. He nodded as if I’d said something sensible and took the thing. Clearly, he knew which was the business end; the engineer in him, no doubt.

“Interesting,” he commented. “The principle―I’m not sure, of course―but I’d guess this is based on control of the weak nuclear force―no wonder it knocks chunks out of solid granite. Very sophisticated. We’ve been working along these lines for some time.” He handed it back; I took it carefully. He showed me how to hold it and pointed out the trigger.

By this time a few people had appeared, opening doors and venturing cautiously out. They saw us and came our way, calling questions before they got in conversational range. We didn’t have any answers. A young woman went to the two dead people and started sobbing. Then we all heard a yell from the middle distance and looked that way. A man with blood on his face was staggering toward our little group of strangers. Burman and a couple of others went to meet him and guide him over. I don’t know why; we couldn’t help him. The bloody nose advanced uncertainly. His eyes were on the dead thing.

“More of them on the way―lots more!” he gasped. “They’re coming out of the old coal cellars at the shipyards. I fell,” he added apologetically, wiping his nose and spreading the crimson stain around. “I saw them kill a man―shoot him―with one of thosel” He pointed to the gadget I was holding. “Blew him apart!” he blurted, and gagged. “It was horrible! He never had a chance! Just a rag-picker, poking around in the rubbish-bin. They killed him like a rat!”

The crowd decided we knew no more than they did, and began moving off, in twos and threes; nobody went alone. A lone rat-man came out of one of those narrow side streets by the old shipyard; he seemed to be in trouble; he was staggering in a comical way on his stubby legs; he stopped to look around, and started our way.

“It’s not armed, I think,” Lars said. I agreed.

“I’ve got a pistol,” I told him. “You’d better take this thing.” I handed him the alien weapon. Ten feet away, the critter stopped to look us over. The beady eyes in the pointed, ratty face flicked over us, stopped at the weapon Burman was holding. It was definitely sniffing. It held out a narrow, long-fingered hand, and made a squeaky sound, like a rusty hinge.

Burman said, “Keep back,” in a mild tone, then, to me, “It makes the hair on my neck stand up.”

The thing squeaked again, more urgently, if I could read human tones in a rusty hinge.

“Who are you?” I asked, just to be saying something.

“You are nod of our trusted cadre,” the thing said in a high-pitched, but comprehensible voice. “Why do you have tisrupdor?” Its eyes flicked to the dead one. “You dreacherously killed Tzl and doog his sidearm,” it accused.

“I sure as hell did, weasel-puss,” I replied, and eased my Walther into quick-draw position. “Your pal Seal killed two people, and would have killed more.”

“ ‘Tzl,’ ” the thing corrected. “Gan none of you mongs learn to speag gorregly?”

“Why should we?” I demanded. “This is our world―” I got that far before he flipped his disruptor into working position. It fit his stubby-armed physique perfectly, which is why it was awkward for Lars, who nonetheless had aimed his disruptor at the alien before it had its weapon at the ready.

“Repend, slaves!” the alien said, in its squeaky but grammatically perfect upper-class English.

“We’re not slaves, rat-head,” Lars told it, quite calmly. “Now: who are you, what are you, and why are you here?”

“I have high honor to be Pack Commander Qzk,” it said, enunciating carefully. “I am not obliged to endure interrogation by scum, but I will tell you, since you appear so appallingly ignorant, that I represent the Central Command of Ylokk, and I am here, with my troopers, to clear native creatures from this urban area. Now, you!” it addressed Burman, ignoring me and my automatic. “Give me that weapon!”

“If you say so, sir,” Lars said humbly, and blew a hole in Commander Qzk big enough to hide a football (soccer-type) in, knocking the arrogant alien for a six-foot slide on his back, after he hit the cobbles. Lars looked at me as if expecting a rebuke.

“As well now as later,” I told him. “Now we have to get to HQ, fast, with this information.” I started off, passing the two dead ‘Locks,’ I think he had called his kind, and the two dead people. So far, the score was even.

Going along the deserted streets, we saw more of the rat-men, mostly in pairs, once a patrol of ten, once a lone critter leaning against a wall and puking. None of them saw us ducking along from shadow to shadow. We reached HQ; the wrought-iron pole-lamps flanking the granite steps were on, and lights burned behind a few windows, but no one, human or alien, was in sight.

There was no guard in the sentry-box inside, either. It was very still, but I thought I heard voices far away, from somewhere above. We went up the marble staircase and along the wide corridor to Richtofen’s office. Again, no sentry on duty. I rapped and an irritable voice snapped.

“You may enter!”

I did, with Lars at my heels, and a burly security type I’d met before aimed a machine pistol at my dinner and said, “Oh, it’s you, colonel. Good. The general wants to see you.”

“Aim that thing at your foot, Helge,” I replied. “This is Lars Burman. He’s on our side―and it’s a good thing, because if he weren’t, he’d have blown you in two with that coathanger he’s holding.”

Helge lowered his weapon rather sheepishly, put out a hand for the disruptor, pulled it in again and nodded at the inner door. Before we reached it, it opened, and Manfred von Richtofen was standing there, gray-haired, immaculate in his Net Surveillance Service uniform, getting just a little stooped now―he was past eighty. He held out a hand and said, “I thought it was you, Brion. Good. Welcome. Come in, and Mr. Burman as well.”

I shook his hand and so did Lars.

“What the hell’s going on, sir?” I asked him. “Where are they coming from?” Richtofen waved a hand at a wall map of the city, which was built on an archipelago, the islands linked by bridges. There were red and yellow pins stuck in it in a pattern of concentric arcs centered on the waterfront, near where I’d met my first rat-man.

“It’s a trans-Net invasion, Brion,” he said grimly. “No doubt about that.”

“How many are there?” was my next question.

“No firm estimate,” he told me. “Not enough data. But a steady stream of reinforcements is arriving. Casualties are light, so far, because we haven’t mounted any organized resistance. They seem to be trying to capture a few people at random, when they happen to encounter them. The first report came in from Goteborg, about an hour ago. A hot-line call, just about the time you were leaving the party. I sent a detail after you, to inform you, but they missed you.”

“I took a shortcut,” I explained.

“Still, you’re here now,” Richtofen said, as if that solved everything.

“Why don’t we call out the local garrison and round them up?” I wanted to know.

“It’s a full-scale invasion,” the general said grumpily. “We can’t hit them all at once. In the city alone, there are hundreds of confirmed sightings so far.” He waved at the map with pins.

“Red for casualties, yellow for just sightings,” he explained. “Whoever they are, they mean business. My technical chief, Sjoman―you’ve met him of course, Brion―tells me they’re from a line far outside our surveillance zone.”

“Have you seen one up close, sir?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “No prisoners yet. They have potent hand weapons and they’re not averse to using them. They’ve repulsed every man who tried to parley with them. I saw two from across the street out front,” he added. “Sneaky-looking fellows; strange hunched-forward way of walking. And one was on all fours for a moment, I’m almost sure.”

“He was,” I confirmed. “Those things aren’t human, Manfred.” I handed him the disruptor.

“This is what they’re doing their shooting with. No, the other way. Careful! It can blow the side out of the building. Better get Sjoman in here. Lars can explain the thing to him.”

Richtofen handled the weapon with respect and pushed a button on his desk that brought the tech chief in at a run. Richtofen handed over the disruptor and Lars went over to him and said, “Fortunately, sir, it’s a type of weapon that will be easy to negate. It projects a field of energy, and with a slight adjustment, it can be made to project an out-of-phase field that cancels the basic field when it impinges on it. We need to run off a batch of them as soon as possible.”

Sjoman was nodding as if that meant something.

“How much territory have they secured, General?” I wanted to know.

“You’re very formal tonight, Brion,” Richtofen replied in mild rebuke. “Here in Stockholm, they’ve taken over the Old Town for some reason, and Sodra, and are rapidly clearing the center of the city. They’ve set up a field HQ on Kungsgatan near Stureplan. We’ve killed a few hundred of them. They seem heedless of our gunfire―walk right into it.”

An aide rushed in just then with a report that confirmed the aliens were swarming in every city and town so far contacted, as well as in Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and every other capital on the continent. London reported fighting in the streets. No word yet from North America. No contact with Japan.

“Communications have virtually collapsed,” Richtofen told us. “These fellows know just what to go after. Bridges and airfields sealed off, transmitter towers down, highways blocked. What news we’ve had has come by sea. It’s as if they were unaware of travel by sea. Our ships come and go freely. They seem to be limiting their attention pretty much to the urban areas, but they’re in the small towns, too. Very few have been seen in rural areas, except in scattered groups. They’re apparently more interested in driving the people out of towns than in killing them; casualties have occurred mostly when people get in their way. Those who flee are allowed to go, then rounded up and detained.”

“That makes it a little difficult,” I commented. “We can’t use heavy weapons on them without destroying our own cities.”

“Precisely,” Richtofen agreed. “I assume that’s the basis for their strategy.”

“How many of them would you say we’re dealing with?” I asked.

“My best guess is about four hundred thousand, at this point,” Richtofen said grimly. “And more arriving every hour.”

“Make that three hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-eight,” Lars contributed.

“It appears,” Manfred said seriously, “that our best strategy is to resort to guerrilla warfare. I’ve already taken steps to establish a field HQ near Uppsala. You and Barbro had better get up there right away. I’m counting on you to take command.”

I said, “Yessir,” but with a sinking feeling.