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                              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.