The Eyes Have It

THE EYES HAVE IT

By

Les Clark

Bentley, careful to place his sneakers where they wouldn’t crunch the crumbled brick and give away his position, peered around the edge of a ruined building just as a transparent drone, with its turreted cameras, whirred past.

When it was out of sight, and he was sure the enemy hadn’t planted another sniffer or smeller trailing secretly behind, Bentley stood, his cracking knee joints protesting his efforts. He keyed his comm, shielding the click under the sweater he’d snagged from a Save-The-Planet bin. He thought at the time, what a cruel joke. But the dusty brown cardigan, preserved in a space bag (ditto on the joke), fit him well.

There were other things living in that faded and rusty yellow box the rebel decided he didn’t want to joust with. The hissing, much like the alien’s form of communication, was disconcerting. Bentley had to back out of the box, bag in tow. “Not a good look,” he murmured, his head scanning the sky, “but the price was right.”

Now, he lifted the comm to his lips, short and long breaths spurting Morse code back to Goldman in the hidden, albeit undermanned command center. “One bogey sans trailers. O and O.”

The street lights had long since burned out or were collateral damage when cities gave way to the overwhelming off-world conquerors. Why had they come here? The prevailing opinion when lakes, ponds and rivers dried up, was the invaders needed fresh water. Huge pulsing tubes descended into the Great Lakes, Massachusetts’ Quabbin Reservoir and Africa’s Lake Tanganyika. Vast swatches of forest lay bare when they plucked trees like ears of corn. It was the curse of a blue planet. Full of water vapor, Earth’s white puffy clouds were the giveaway.

Earth’s human population refused to give up their valuable resources without a fight. The one sided slog was over in months. However, rebels like Harry “The Cat” Bentley fought on. In the moonless night, he silently jogged back to the dank basement where Goldman, Harkness, James and Forrester maintained a database of the alien’s comings and goings.

As he reached the camouflaged door, Bentley breathed more Morse into his comm. Loaded with grease, it slid silently to the side, wide enough for him to slip through.

Harkness, Sarah “The Slick” to her friends, wrapped her arms around Bentley’s neck and laid some smooches wherever he pointed.

Larry Goldman, yet to have (really, to earn) a rebel moniker, looked up from his laptop screen. “Really, guys, he was only gone for four hours, and I need some debrief time. We only need his intel to complete their grid pattern. They’ve gotten lazy with their predictability.”

Sarah stuck out her tongue but released her partner. Bently sat beside Goldman and with a pencil nub, drew the flight patterns of the various enemy drones he’d memorized during this most recent nighttime foray. Goldman typed in the information. Red dotted lines for the alien’s large infrared drones, yellow for the cameras. Black lines were the worst. Those drones bristled with pulsed lasers pointing everywhere. Those weapons dissolved anything they blasted. Goldman watched with fascination the green dots representing Harry’s footsteps for the past week and blue squares designating the rebels’ mobile locations changing every night. If Goldman slammed the cover shut, it would self-destruct.

“Wow, Harry, you cover a lot of ground. And no one...I mean, nothing sees you? Amazing.”

“I’m quicker with the rubber padding on my sneaks. Cats don’t hear me. The night vision helmet shows me the way. There were some marauders a few blocks up I stayed away from. They’re brave and foolish.”

Getting a bottled water, Harry accepted a power bar Mildred Forrester had fashioned from the upstairs shelves of snacks in the abandoned convenience store. They were rapidly becoming bare, and Sarah thinner, with more dangerous sorties to supermarkets not yet denuded by gangs. Forrester was stretching supplies, mixing vitamins with limp vegetables, canned soups and small varmints she’d managed to trap. They never asked and she never offered.

Merrill James, sat quietly in a side room with walls coated in thick foam padding. He gently touched a dial. On the roof, a sensor swiveled quietly, locking on to yet another alien drone making its rounds. In the past few weeks, shortly after they landed to pluck away earth’s natural resources, rebel groups were gathering information on how the invaders communicated. James had been a sound engineer at WZBR-TV. With scavenged equipment, he was able to listen in, but not yet interpret how they communicated.

Tonight, however, he matched bursts of static to and from the various drones with their movements. Different short bursts, which James printed out, synched with camera movements. Longer ones changed their direction. Sarah shuffled her feet, breaking his intense mood. When he turned, four faces, green with reflected oscilloscope light, were mesmerized with the screen’s squiggles.

“OMG! Next sortie, can someone get some mouthwash.”

Sarah knuckled his shoulder. “Yes, MJ, war is hell. Now, tell us what we’re seeing.”

James shook his head as he turned back, pointing to the mysteries floating on the scope. “The sensors and cameras we placed on the rooftops last week are mostly unidirectional. They triangulate to an altitude where those various drones make passes over Washington square. I think they cover from a hundred feet up to a thousand but our beams do have a fan shape so we can track them. They’re slow enough. I can’t figure the power source.”

Forrester munching noisily on something that had lost its freshness months earlier, pointed to a curious sequence of sine waves.

“Okay, smarty pants, do you know what those are?”

“Mill, that’s a dog treat you’re snacking on. And yes, if you’ll look at the camera, see how their infrared drone stopped, did a 360 and moved on?”

Sharp spikes interrupted the middle of the sequence.

Sharp intakes of breath interrupted their technical séance.

Merrill James held up his hand. “That my friends, is an invisible beam. Their radar or infrared or whatever weapon must have picked up a cat or rat. It’s probably goop now.”

Bently stepped back. “Could it be they got one of those gangs getting careless?”

Sarah slipped her hand into his. “Good thing it wasn’t you, love.”

“What say we talk, mi amigos,” Goldman said, rallying his small band back to their meeting table. “I have an idea, mates. It may be way out, possibly way in.”

When they were all seated, Goldman looked at Merrill James, blinking as rapidly as the facets of his idea taking shape. “MJ, I’m going to verbalize this as best I can. Um, you have intercepted their signals controlling the drones terrorizing us locally. I suspect this same thing is going on everywhere. You see their squiggles controlling drone movements and the activation of their weapons. Right?”

“Right. With their drones, I can see all three axis movements as well as weapon activation. I have recorded everything with the equipment we moved here. I know their frequencies. Radio here is old tech. Even microwave signals. An unearthed Marconi would understand it. What are you getting at?”

“In amongst all that equipment you’ve been accumulating, do you...can you...generate the same signals? You know...”

James was smiling broadly. “You mean, Goldy, can we pretend we’re them?”

“Goldy, huh? That’s the best you can do? I don’t get no respect like that comedian. So what did they call you when you were a kid? One of the seven dwarf’s names? Goldy indeed!”

Forrester waited until they were all seated before setting down mismatched bowls of something steaming and dark. “Larry focus! All of you eat! Yes, Sarah. You as well. And don’t ask.”

A few eyebrows went up with appreciative murmurs. Forrester passed around a sleeve of rescued Ritz. “Okay, Mister Goldman, if that’s what you’d like to be called, what’s your idea?”

Three months later, after arduous collaboration with other dispersed rebel groups and the surreptitious filching of radio and microwave equipment from police stations and military bases, and led by “Goldy’s Gang,” the operation code-named Operation Turnabout Is Fair Play went into effect but not without cost. The ash silhouettes of Sarah and Bentley, still hand in hand, faded in a breeze on a full moon night.

In the skies around Earth, black shapes took leave of their predictable paths and the plundering of its natural resources, and slowly rose into its blue heavens. Hundreds of deadly drones took up positions around the dozens of alien ships.

On the ground, Merrill James, and others like him, turned alien weapons against their own ships, rapidly typing target coordinates.

On board the invader’s vessels, horrified nightmarish things cast their minds and optical receptors at their view screens. And as any sentient being might consider in checkmate, they shared the same notion of “I think someone’s watching” before a maelstrom, hotter than the sun, consumed them.