The foxholes of Mars

Fritz Leiber

The wars of the far future will be fought with giant spaceships, but it will still take the infantryman to hold down the planets. And some of the thoughts bred in the foxholes of Mars or Alpha Centauri Duo or Rigel Tres will be fully as bitter as some of those dredged up in the foxholes of Earth.

Ever inward from the jagged horizon the machines of death crept, edged, scurried, rocketed, and tunneled towards him. It seemed as if all this purple-sunned creation had conspired to isolate, to smash him. To the west-for all planets share a west, if nothing else-the nuclear bombs bloomed, meaningless giant fungi. Invisibly overhead the spaceships roared, distant as gods, yet shaking the yellow sky. Even the soil was treacherous, nauseated by artificial earthquakes-nobody's mother, least of all an Earthman's.

"Why don't you cheer up?" the others had said to him. "It's a mad planet." But he would not cheer up, for he knew what they said was literally true. Soon they would fall back and the enemy would retake the mangled thing they called an objective. Was it the sixth time? The seventh? And did the soldiers on the other side have six legs, or eight? The enemy were pretty haphazard as to what troops they used in this sector.

Worse was the noise. Meaningless, mechanical screeches tore at his skull, until thoughts rattled around in it like dry seeds in a dry pod. He started to lift his hands to his ears, then checked the gesture, convulsed with soundless laughter and tearless weeping, bitter memories and searing hatred. Once there had been a galactic society-a galactic empire-and he had played an unnoticed part on one of its nice quiet planets ... but now? Galactic empire? Galactic horse-dung! Perhaps he had always hated his fellow men as much as he did now. But in the prewar days his hatred had been closely bound and meticulously repressed. It was still bound, tighter than ever-but it was no longer repressed.

The deadly engine he tended, silent for a moment, began again to chatter to those of the enemy; its voice was nearly drowned by their booming ones, like a spiteful child in a crush of complacent adults....

It turned out that they had been covering a withdrawal of Martian sappers, and must now escape as best they might. They began to retreat. The officer running beside him fell. He hesitated. The officer cursed a new, useless joint that had appeared in his leg. All the others-including the black-shelled Martians-were ahead. He glanced around, fearfully, tormentedly, as if he were about to commit a hideous crime. Then he lifted the officer and staggered on, reeling like a top at the end of its spin. He was still grinning in a spasmic way when they reached the security of lesser danger; even when the officer thanked him with curt sincerity, he couldn't stop grinning. Nevertheless, they gave him the Order of Planetary Merit for that.

He stared at the watery soup and meat-shreds in his mess-tin. The cellar was cool, and its seats-though built for creatures with four legs and two arms-were comfortable. The purple daylight was pleasantly muted. The noise had gone a little way off, playing cat and mouse. He was alone.

Of course life had never had any meaning, except for the chillingly sardonic one perceptible to the demons in the nuclear bombs and the silver giants in space who pushed the buttons; and he had no stomach to aspire to that. They'd had ten thousand years to fix things, those giants, and still all they could tell you was go dig yourself a hole.

In the old days the possibility of relaxation and petty self-indulgence, against the magnificent sham background of galactic empire, had permitted him to pretend life had a meaning. Yet at a time like this, when such an illusion was needful, it ran out on you, jeered at you along with the lesser lies it had nurtured.

A three-legged creature skipped out of the shadows, halted at a distance, and subtly intimated it would like food. At first he thought it must be some Rigelian tripedal, but then he saw it was an Earth-cat lacking a leg. Its movements were grotesque, but efficient, and not without a certain gracefulness. How it could have got to this planet, he found it hard to imagine.

"But you don't worry about that-or even about other cats. Three-legs," he thought bitterly. "You hunt alone. You mate with your own kind, when you can, but then only because it is most agreeable. You don't set up your own species as a corporate divinity and worship it, and yearn over the light-centuries of its empire, and eat out your heart because of it, and humbly spill your blood at its cosmic altar.

"Nor are you hoodwinked when the dogs bark about the greatness of humanity under a thousand different moons, or when the dumb cattle sigh from surfeit and gratefully chew their cuds under red, green and purple suns. You accept us as something sometimes helpful. You walk into our spaceships as you walked up to our fires. You use us. But when we're gone, you won't pine on our graves or starve in the pen. You'll manage, or try to."

The cat mewed. He tossed it a bit of meat, which it caught in its teeth, shifting about cleverly on the two good hind legs. As he watched it daintily nibble (though scrawny with famine), he suddenly saw Kenneth's face, just as he had last seen it on Alpha Centauri Duo. It seemed very real, projected against the maroon darkness towards the other end of the cellar. The full tolerant lips lined at the corners, the veiledly appraising eyes, the space-sallow skin were all exactly as they had been when they roomed together at the Sign of the Burnt-Out Jet. But there was a richness and a zest about the face that he had missed before. He did not try to move toward the illusion, though he wanted to. He only looked. Then there came the sound of boots on the floor above, and the cat bounded away, humping its hind quarters quite like a tripedal, and the vision quickly faded. For a long time he sat staring at the spot where it had been, feeling a strangely poignant unhappiness, as if the only worthwhile being in the world had died. Then he started to eat his food with the vague curiosity of a two-year-old, sometimes pausing with the spoon half-way to his mouth.

It was night, and there was a ground mist through which the wine-colored moons showed like two sick eyes, and anything might have been moving in the shadows. He squinted and peered over the rim of the trench, but it was hard to make out the nature of any object, the landscape was so torn and distorted. Three men came out of the place of underground concealment to the left, joking together in hushed, hollow voices. One whom he knew well (a stocky soldier with big eyes and smirking lips and reddish stubble on his chin) greeted him with a friendly jibe about easy jobs. Then they wormed their way up and over, and started to crawl toward where enemy scouts (six legs or eight?) were supposed to lie. He lost sight of them very quickly. He held his weapon ready, watching for the sight of the enemy.

Why did he hate the soldiers of the enemy so little? No more than a Martian hunting sand-dragons hates sand-dragons. His relationship with them was limited, almost abstract. How could he hate something so different from himself in form? He could only marvel that it too had intelligence. No, the enemy were merely dangerous targets. Once he had seen one of them escape death, and it had made him feel happy; he had wanted to wave in a friendly way, even if it could at best have only wriggled a tentacle in return-

But as for the men who fought side by side with him-he hated them bitterly, loathed their faces, voices, physical mannerisms. The way this one chewed and that one spat. Their unchanging curses, cliches, and jokes. All unendurably magnified, as if his nose were being rubbed in offal. For they were part of the same miserable, lying, self-worshipping galactic swarm as himself.

He wondered if he had hated the men at the office on Altair Una in the same way-

Almost certainly. He recalled the long smoldering irritations over trifles that had seemed tremendous in the hours between the violin-moans of the time clock ... but then there had been the safety valves and shock absorbers that make life tolerable, and also the illusion of purpose.

But now there was nothing. And everybody knew it.

They had no right to joke about it and continue the pretense.

He was shaking with anger. To kill indiscriminately would at least demonstrate his feelings. To focus death on the backs of men charging with inane hysteria. To toss a nuclear fizz-bomb into a dugout where men sought secret escape in dreams and repeated like prayers their rationalizations about galactic empires. Dying at his hand, they might for a moment understand their own vicious hypocrisy.

From out ahead, one of death's little mechanisms spoke concisely, rapidly. It seemed like a bugle call that only he could hear.

Ruby moonlight slid suddenly across the grotesquely tortured ground. He raised his weapon and took aim. Its sound pleased him because it was like a soft groan of agony.

Then he realized he had fired at the abruptly-revealed shadow because it was that of the stocky soldier who had jibed and crawled away....

The moonlight blacked out as if a curtain had been drawn. His heart pounded. He ground his teeth and grinned. His feelings were fierce, but not yet determinate. He became aware of the smells of the ground and of the chemicals and metals; strong, sharp, interesting smells.

Then he found himself staring at a whitish patch that never got more than eight inches off the ground. Slowly it approached out of the darkness, like the inquisitive head of a huge...