THE HOPLITE

By Richard Sheridan

They were the mightiest warriors the
universe had ever known. All they
lacked was——something to live for!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Jord awoke to the purr of the ventilators billowing the heavy curtains at the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold, realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man and matter and leave only drabness and emptiness.

His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readied for sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear of unfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room, identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the day's objectives.

He lay quietly on the pallet; dimly conscious of identity, clinging physically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Pale light, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportant hunger, dim fear of incipient living.

He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful, sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell on wrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes from a synthetic Virginia. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lay with it jutting from his lips. The steady, filtered, odorless breeze centered on his senseless frontal lobes and whispered down his silver cheeks.

A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpet to the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. He fumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed it hard with a childish impatience.

Perseverance.

Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tube destroyed themselves with rigid self-control. Careful suction, then, and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into his lungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction.

It tasted bad, but he'd expected that it would.

He didn't have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required only that he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself to be scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire.

He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to be expelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere that consisted of little else.

His last night's pleasure stirred, vainly fought the inevitable and fluttered its hands. "You awake, Soldier?"

The room glowed with a rosy light.

"Approximately."

The woman uncoiled herself and lay flat. Through the tangle of bronzed hair, one ear shone whitely. She brushed the hair from her eyes and her scarlet mouth opened in a feline yawn. The woman was pink and white; she quivered in voluptuous ecstasy and slithered on the satin with her own satiny, round and naked flesh.

"I didn't hear the alarm," she said, her voice thick with the residue of sleep. Her body pressed warm to his as she slid his cigarette from his fingers.

He shared the cigarette, thinking of the distance between the bed and the bathroom. The clock told him he had eight minutes to wait for maximum emission. His physiological chart showed a tolerance of nine and one-third hours.

Eight minutes to wait. Then he would have twenty minutes in which to shower, and fifteen to clothe himself in the shimmering, clinging opaque that, like the casing on a sausage, would cover him, leaving only his eyes, ears and mouth. These the neurologist would take care of before the mechanics fitted him into his machine for his next tour of duty.

There was a time for eating, time for a last cigarette, time for briefing and a long, long time for the Galbth II.

Time for everything but living.

Gently he kissed the woman's soft neck. "What's your name?" he asked wistfully, his attention divided between the short gold hairs at the base of her head and the all important clock.

The woman chuckled chidingly and toyed with his hands, tracing the veins that stood rigid on their backs where the tortured nerves had forced them to the surface like a maze of pale blue pipes.

She did not answer. He could no more know her name than he could know her face behind the silver opaque—than he could know her voice behind the vocal distorter—no more than he could know anyone, or that anyone could know him.

Three times a week the Sex-Dispatcher sent him a woman. For all he knew it could be the same woman, or three different women.

"Can I tell the dispatcher that I pleased you?" The voice distorter had shifted and made her sound as though she had a cold. It was, of course, impossible. That scourge hadn't attacked the fortress in thirty years. In all probability it would never attack it again.

He nodded, grinding the cigarette into the ashtray. "It would be nice," he said, "if we could know one another."

She smiled. "Some day."

The clock gave warning, counting backwards through thirty seconds. Jord patted the woman's thigh in dismissal. "You may as well go now."

She slid from the bed, neither reluctant nor impatient. Her simple tunic lay on the crimson rug where she had dropped it nine hours before. "Good-by, Soldier," she said.

He was already on his way to the bathroom. If he should see her again, her voice would be different, her hair would be different. She had no scars or physical aberrance that he could recognize her by. She was healthy, intelligent and normal, and therefore selected for breeding. So was he. Ask the geneticists. He had.

In the bathroom, the clock told him to wash his face. Carefully he rubbed desensitizer on his mask, on the ten thousand artificial nerve endings that transcribed every motion of the living tissue it encased and magnified that motion a thousand times to the mightier motions of the machine.

The desensitizer entered the porous material; the mask sagged and became transparent like a cellophane sack. He lifted it from his face.

Two huge holes for eyes, a gaping rent of a mouth. He threw it with disgust into the depository. It would go back to the Neurological Division to be cleaned and repaired.

He looked into the mirror with the interest of a man who sees his face on rare occasions. The nerves stood out like splintered cracks in glass. He fingered his face lovingly, unmindful of the agony caused by his touch, remembering the woman. He wondered in what manner her face would differ from his.

The pain made him stop thinking about it and he closed his eyes to spray a weak solution of desensitizer on the burning flesh. Almost immediately the pain was gone; but it left him with a marble mask that wouldn't come to life again until the effects of the desensitizer wore off.

He washed quickly in warm water, rubbed disinfectant on the atrophied area, rinsed it and stepped in front of the dryer. A thousand tongues of almost corporeal warmth licked over his skin.

He had shaved and desensitized his body the night before, so it was only a matter of washing and disinfecting before he climbed into the overall casing and stepped clumsily into the sensitizing shower. The huge bag began to shrink and cloud, adhering to his body as though it were another layer of his skin.

Since the casing acted as a magnifying extension of his nervous and muscular systems, his body, within the casing, felt nothing. There was no sense of contact as he walked across the floor and opened the bathroom door. As far as feeling went, he was without a body.

He said "hello" experimentally, to see if the distorter was still on. It wasn't. The hard flatness of his voice surprised him. The rosy light was gone also. Something peculiar to women caused the filter to slide over the coldly glowing silver. No man could cause it. No warrior was supposed to want to.

He went through the curtains into the tube-like corridor and joined the other silver warriors on their way to the mess hall. He knew no one of them, yet knew them all. In battle, no friend of his would die, yet no one would die that he did not know. Two hundred years of war in this forgotten bit of the universe had shown the value of this. Some day, if he lived to be old, he would become a civilian. Until then the only faces he would see would be his own and those of the subnormal servers in the mess hall. He had no loyalties except to the fortress. The fortress was his past, present and future.

He nodded a greeting to his server. "How are you today, Teddy?" The voice distorter made him a gentle baritone.

The moron stared at him blankly, not understanding what was spoken, not caring. It was mentally impossible for him to care about anyone and psychologically impossible for anyone to care about him. That was why he was allowed to serve in the mess.

He set Jord's rations before him in their plastic containers. A scientific measure of calories, proteins, vitamins, minerals and hay-like roughage.

Jord wished the idiot was able to talk, but decided against holding a one-sided conversation with him. He used to do it quite often, taking pleasure in the shifting planes of his face, until he'd become sick with longing for a complete human being. He knew no one and only his psychiatrist knew him. The fortress was to him one complete body.

The parts of that body could never be allowed to become more important than the total of those parts. It was the first thing a potential master of a Galbth II learned: The basic lesson in loneliness.

He choked down the measured kilograms of roughage, saving the concentrates until the last when he could suck out the synthetic flavoring and delude himself for a moment that he was eating food. His fare consisted of the precise amount necessary to keep him operating at maximum efficiency and maintain optimum size. A two-pound variation in his weight would require a refitting.

He smoked his last cigarette for the day and then made his way to the third section briefing room.

There were twelve warriors in his section. Except for microscopic differences in their builds, there was little, if anything, to distinguish one from the other. They had no contact with anything as personalized as officers. Each warrior was a separate unit. The centralization of authority was complete. There was only the loudspeaker to command. For a time the warriors had been allowed to designate the voice as "The General," but it was soon discovered that they felt a particular loyalty to the name. The word was dropped. To designate authority, a warrior used the word: "Authority." This word also served as his official concept of politics. With all the strength of the fortress in the warriors, this was to be desired.

Simultaneously, the speaker and the large television screen below it came to life.

The scene showed one of the fortress's carefully tilled roughage farms being looted by a large body of the natives—the enemy that was determined to erase the last remnant of an empire that once held the entire solar system in its grasp. That meant nothing to Jord. It was the faces—the faces that were, relatively, not even faces at all. Yet there were points of similarity within the gulf of difference—and the faces. Faces without masks!

The voice called "Authority" was expressionless and precise.

"As you can see, a large and heavily armed contingent of the enemy has breached the dome of number seven surface-farm."

The scout obligingly swiveled his television optic to show the fused gap in the huge plastic dome through which the natives were hauling incendiary materials to destroy the crop. The motionless bulk of a warrior lay close beside the opening. He had been downed by artillery, while above the force-field the ever present aircraft of the natives circled watchfully. Somewhere, the ancient generators had shorted long enough for the raiders to slip through.

"A detachment has already been sent out," the voice continued. "The natives are to be forced back beyond the northern defense perimeter. Intelligence estimates eight hundred of the enemy and thirty field-pieces. The fortress depends on you. You will not fail the fortress."

On that note, the loudspeaker was silent.

"It seems to me," the warrior on Jord's right murmured as they moved towards the opening bulkhead at the far side of the room, "that we almost always fail." He wasn't contradicting, only remarking.

Jord nodded. One warrior lost today, two last week, one the week before, and more before that. He saw the leviathans, 140 tons of machinery with great gaping holes in their bodies, saw the wires and conduits, armor and all the intricacies that went into a Galbth II. He saw them steaming, stumbling, falling—respirators clogged—smothering. Their motions weakened, their limbs failed, the warriors died.

Two hundred years ago the planet had been a peaceful colony. Then with the collapse of the empire had come two hundred years of reversals, and they who had once been the overseers of harmless workers now found themselves struggling for the barest survival. Only the workers, the natives, had adapted.

He went through the bulkhead into the immenseness of the cavern where the machines stood waiting in the shadowless light.

Down the iron catwalks the silver warriors ran. Down to the mechanics, down to the surgeons with their surgeon fingers dead white beneath the operating lamps. All waiting. Waiting to fit the mechanism for a thousand eyes to the optic nerves, the amplifiers to the audio.

Jord felt the familiar horror.

When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned.

Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, feet, legs, shoulders, back, neck, jaw, cheeks, nose, eyes—

His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below.

"Check motion!"

He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and 140 tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside.

The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man.

A ton of fist opened and closed, moved with effortless grace and fell to his side with enough power to crush a block of granite. His atomic muscles turned silently when he walked. His legs of flesh commanding legs of steel. He could walk two hundred miles an hour or run five times that fast. He could thread a needle with his fingers, or rip through a mountain.

"Check respirators."

"Check."

The technicians scurried from the cavern floor. The all-clear sounded and the roof slid open and a ramp grew up from the floor.

His voice echoed through the cavern, mingling with the voices of the other warriors. Joyous, thankful voices—the horror had passed and they were alive again.

On the surface it was winter. The methane-frosted ground beneath the machines was like iron. Iron against steel feet rang in the heavy air. Wispy tendrils of steam rose from the great bodies. The respirators sucked and transformed ammonia and methane. The great feet left imprints in earth and stone.

Jord exulted in the freedom of the surface, in the long vistas of unwalled space, in the curve of a far away horizon. He exulted in his machine body, so human in its parts, so more than human in its size and capabilities. The column of the neck, the steel sinews; every muscle, every ligament, every nerve of the human body had its counterpart in the machine. What man could do, the machine did. What affected man, in proportion, affected the machine.

Even to pain, the machine was complete.

He withdrew his optics and sent his telescope rising ten feet above his head, searching the gray land for the other detachment. A dozen miles away he could see the dome of the ravished farm. The little specks were scurrying to complete their destruction before the dreaded warriors should appear. They had blocked the entrance of the shallow valley in which the farm lay with their artillery. Behind it the gunners would try to hold off the warriors and give the rest time to escape. Not that it mattered. The enemy cared little for his losses.

His telescope swiveled, found the scarp of an ancient bomb, ringed with what was probably fission produced obsidian, and rested on the bodies of the machines who had beaten his detachment to the scene and now came streaming out to join them.

The two detachments merged, hesitated as each warrior assumed his position and began the attack.

They would charge straight at the guns, so much a warrior cared for the marksmanship of former slaves—so much a warrior cared for the power of native shells.

Ar eight miles the snouts of the cannons began to belch. The gunnery was high. The barrage passed harmlessly overhead.

The first strike was for him. The armor-piercing shell clanged and flattened out against his chest, staggering him back. He rallied, caught his balance, sped on. He almost pitied the limited inventiveness of the natives, whose genius ended when they drove man into the fortresses.

Another shell. A warrior whirled and stumbled. Jord crashed into him, steadied him. The explosions blended into an endless sound.

He felt a shell bounce from his shoulder, taking six optics with it and leaving the smell of scorched steel. They were too thick now to dodge, too close to bear. Earth and stone sprayed up from a sudden crater before him. He wheeled. Now they were in a range where the shells could disable an arm or leg.

An arm! A stiff-hung, motionless limb of steel.

The rush had brought them to the artillery. Their feet trampled the ancient guns. They smashed at belching muzzles with hammer fists. They had breached the defenses. The natives had fled. In minutes they would be trampling the fleeing enemy.

Then the earth erupted....

Jord had only one leg still functioning when he regained consciousness. One leg and perhaps eight of his optics. His audio was dead and there was something wrong with his respirator. He had to fight to keep down the panic.

A warrior who had been trapped inside his machine once told him what it was like inside a Galbth II when you couldn't move, or help yourself. If you but closed your eyes you imagined yourself inside a shell, and that shell inside a larger shell, and that inside a still larger shell until, after a hundred shells, you could imagine your machine, still true to your form, lying helpless and twisted on the ground.

There was no way you could get out of your machine without the help of the mechanics. Even if there were it was impossible to exist on the surface. You had to lie where you fell. Or, if possible, make your way back as best you could to your lock.

He tried moving. His good leg sawed the air like a giant flail. There was some motion in his chest, but that was all. He erected all the optics he could control and found himself lying on his stomach, dismembered. About twenty yards to the right he saw the other leg of his machine lying across a warrior who seemed to have no motion at all. As far as he could see, no one had escaped. Warriors and parts of warriors were strewn all about him. He swiveled his optics in anxiety. If he were to be rescued, it must be soon. Already the air was foul and he was having trouble focusing his optics.

He wanted to get out of the machine. He never wanted anything as much as he wanted this. The smell of metal and the taste of metal strangled him. He wanted to get out. Worse than he wanted faces, worse than he wanted identity, worse than he wanted to be able to live on the surface. He could feel all the weight of the machine on his body. The vocalizer was still on and he moaned into the dirt.

He tried to raise his optics again, but the power had somehow failed. Many-faced, congealing darkness drew near. He rushed into it.

The Genocide Squad was the first to go into the crater.

The last warrior had ceased moving. Later the salvagers would come to collect the precious metals. They drilled Jord's machine open but, luckily, by this time he was dead.

"Which one next?" he asked, clambering awkwardly from the hole in the machine's back. He was a native and, except for certain functional differences in his construction, was little distinguished from other natives. But normalcy is relative. The normalcy of a native may be radically different from that of a fortress dweller.

"We are fortunate the bomb didn't destroy more of these bodies," he said, rejoining his partner at the side of the warrior.

"What is it like, inside?" his partner asked curiously.

The Genocide Monitor stopped for a moment and appraised the vast bulk. He had long ago ceased to be either fascinated or repelled by the soft, unfunctional bodies of fortress dwellers.

"Just another human," the android said.