Clifford D. Simak - Aliens for Neighbors 02 - Honorable Opponent

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Honourable Opponent

Cifford D Simak

The Fivers were late.

Perhaps they had misunderstood.

Or this might be another of their tricks.

Or maybe they never had intended to stick to their agreement.

"Captain," asked General Lyman Flood, "what time have we got now ?"

Captain Gist looked up from the chessboard. "Thirty-seveno-eight,

galactic, sir."

Then he went back to the board again. Sergeant Conrad had pinned his

knight and he didn't like it.

"Thirteen hours late !" the general fumed.

"They may not have got it straight, sir."

"We spelled it out to them. We took them by the hand and we went over it

time and time again so they'd have it clear in mind. They couldn't possibly

misunderstand." But they very possibly could, he knew.

The Fivers misunderstood almost everything. They had been confused about

the armistice--as if they'd never heard of an armistice before. They had been

obtuse about the prisoner e~xchange. Even the matter of setting a simple time

had involved acruciating explanation--as if they had never heard of the

measurement of time and were completely innocent of basic mathematics.

"Or maybe they broke down," the 'captain offered.

The general snorted. "They don't break down. Those ships of theirs are

marvels. They'd live through anything. They whipped us, didn't they ?"

"Yes sir," said the captain.

"How many of them, Captain, do you estimate we de stroyed ?"

"Not more than a dozen, sir."

"They're tough," the general said.

He went back across the tent and sat down in a chair.

The captain had been wrong. The right number was eleve~

And of those, only one had been confirmed destroyed. Th others had been no

better than put out of action.

And the way it figured out, the margin had been more tha ten to one in

favour of the Flyers. Earth, the general admitte to himself, had never taken

such a beating. Whole squadron had been wiped out; others had come fleeing

back to Base wi~ their numbers cut in half.

They came fleeing back to Base and there were no cripple

They had returned without a scratch upon them. And the shi1 that had been

lost had not been visibly destroyed--they h, simply been wiped out, leaving

not a molecule of wreckage.

How do you beat a thing like that, he asked himself. How you fight a

weapon that cancels out a ship in its entirety ?

Back on Earth and on hundreds of other planets in tZ

Galactic Confederacy, thousands of researchers were workh day and night in

a crash-priority programme to find an answ to the weapon--or at least to find

the weapon.

But the chance of success ran thin, the general knew, f there was not a

single clue to the nature of it. Which w understandable, since every victim of

the weapon had been lc irretrievably.

Perhaps some of the human prisoners would be able provide a clue. If there

had been no such hope, he knew, EaJ never would have gone to all the trouble

to make this prisor exchange.

He watched the captain and the sergeant hunched above t chessboard, with

the captive Fiver looking on.

He called the captive over.

The captive came like a trundling roly-poly.

And once again, watching him, the general had that strange, disturbing

sense of outrage.

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Clifford D. Simak - Aliens for Neighbors 02 - Honorable Opponent

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