Troublemakers by Harlan Ellison Read Free Book Online Page B

separate batteries. They were intent on what they were doing, certain that anyone in those other ships
        (and why did the Adjutant keep getting the feeling that those other ships were empty?)
        would turn tail and disappear as quickly as the dirty saucer had done an hour and a quarter before.
        They had just lobbed five fast shells at a snow-white saucer with purple markings, when the dirty saucer reappeared.
        Flick!
        He was back, that hairy alien in the dirty, stained toga. He was back in the same spot he had vacated, almost directly above the General’s batteries.
        The pillar rose, and the General watched stunned as the metal top slid off the pillar, and the alien stepped out.
        He stepped onto the top of his ship, and they saw the gash in the hull had been repaired. Caulked with some sort of black sticky stuff that stuck to the alien’s clawed feet as he walked along the top of the saucer. He carried a thick, gun-like object in his hands, cradled against his massive chest.
        Then he screamed something in a voice like thunder. They could hear it only roughly, for it was in a guttural tongue. Then he switched to English, and screamed again, in more detail.
        The General strained his ears. His hearing had never been the best, but the Adjutant heard, it was clear to see, from the look of horror and failure and frustration on his face. Then the Adjutant dove away from the antiaircraft gun, rolled over several times, and sprinted out into the desert.
        The General hesitated only a moment before following, but that was enough.
        The alien turned the gun-like object on the batteries, and a roar and a flesh sent the metal screaming skyward, ripping and shredding. Bodies were flung in every direction, and a blue pallor settled across the landscape as a thirty-foot crater opened where the battery had been.
        The General felt himself lifted, buffeted, and thrown. He landed face forward in the ditch, and saw his arm land five feet away. He screamed; the pain in his left side was excruciating.
        He screamed again, and in a moment Alberts was beside him, dragging him away from the area of destruction. The alien was standing spraddle-legged atop his machine, blasting, blasting, scouring the Earth with blue fire.
        The alien screamed in English again, and then he stepped into the pillar, which lowered into the ship once more. A few seconds later the ship flicked! away, and materialized in the sky ten miles off, above the air base.
        There was more blasting. Blue pallor lit the sky for a full half hour.
        The saucer flicked! and was gone. A few moments later the blue pallor-fainter yet, but strengthening all the time-was seen twenty miles further on, washing Las Vegas.
        Flick! Flick! Flick!
        And a dozen more saucers, dirtier than the first, materialized, paused a moment as though getting their bearings, then flicked! away.
        For the next hours the blue pallor filled the sky, and it was easy to see the scouring was moving across the planet systematically.

    The General’s head was cradled in his Adjutant’s lap. He was sinking so rapidly there was no hope at all. His entire left side had been scorched and ripped open. He lay there, looking up at the face of the once-dapper Adjutant, his eyes barely focusing. His tongue bulged from his. mouth, and then a few words.
        Haltingly, “I...c-couldn’t hear...what he s-said, Alb-berts. W-what...did...he...say?”
        The General’s eyes closed, but his chest still moved. The Adjutant felt all the hatred he had built for this man vanish. Though the blustering fool had caused the death of a world, still he was dying, and there was no sense letting him carry that guilt with him.
        “Nothing, General. Nothing at all. You did your very best, sir.”
        Then he realized the last “sir” had been spoken uselessly. The General was dead.
        “You did your