I nodded. I realized it. I realized a lot more than she knew. Family was just as much a cult as Jason's Tribe was. A different philosophy, a different leader, a different purpose, a different head game-but a cult nonetheless.
And either I wanted to be a part of it or I didn't.
The truth was, I wasn't sure what I wanted any more.
"I just want to help the kids," I said. And that much was true. She sighed. She ran a hand through her graying hair. She looked very tired. She shook her head in resignation. "Go do something where you can't get into any more trouble. I got your worm fences approved last night. Go put them up." Then she added, "Just stay away from me for a while. And stay away from the kids too. Even your own. I don't know how I'm going to clean up this mess. . . ."
39
Worm Fences
"Good neighbors make good fences."
-SOLOMON SHORT
It's impossible to build a fence that will keep a worm
Actually, out.
A full-grown Chtorran is like a Patton-6 tank with a mouth. A half-grown worm is the mouth without the tank attached. The best you can hope to do is slow the worm down-or at least make it so painfully uncomfortable for the creature to go over, under, or through the barricade that it looks for a way to go around instead.
The idea is to make the price of lunch higher than the worm is willing to pay.
That's what Jack Balaban and I were doing.
Using Duke's name and number again, I requisitioned enough worm fencing to cordon off the narrowest part of the peninsula with multiple rows of razor-ribbon and punji-barriers. Sooner or later, I knew, one of Uncle Ira's accounting programs was going to catch up with me; but in the meantime, I seemed to have an unlimited credit account; that is, Duke did.
A good fence would be tricky to install, yes, but if we were thorough, we might be able to buy ourselves a reasonable degree of safety. First, we would lay down a strip of razor-ribbon, several long coils of it, firmly anchored every half-meter by a spike in the ground. The razor-ribbon alone wouldn't stop the worms, but it would certainly stop any human beings working with worms. We needed to keep the renegades from getting to the punji-barriers; renegades had been caught hammering down breaks for their extraterrestrial partners.
Then, the first row of punji-strip would be installed just behind the razor-ribbon. Punji-strip came in huge rolls; you unrolled it where you wanted it and spiked it into the ground. What you got was a wide strip of aluminum spikes, unevenly spaced, pointing in all directions, mostly upward. The spikes were sharp and nasty looking and coated with microencapsulated bad news: poisons, ucrve jellies, and various forms of bacteria that seemed to like the vsides of a Chtorran.
A human being might be able to pick his way across a punji-barrier, if he were careful, but a worm could never make it. Too many clumsy little feet. The worm would rip out its belly. The average Chtorr didn't have the leverage to step over these spikes; its feet were tiny little stubs that didn't lift its weight as much as helped shuffle it forward. Punji-barriers were nasty.
The barrier alone wouldn't kill the worm, just injure it badly; hut the stuff on the spikes could give a worm a bad case of the cold rullywobbles. And someday we'd find something that would kill them a little quicker.
The worms knew about the barriers, of course. Most of them stayed away from them. Only a very young and inexperienced worm would willingly make the attempt to cross one, and then only once; the value of the barriers was more as deterrent than as weapon.
Behind the first punji-barrier, another row of razor-ribbon. Behind that, another punji-barrier. Behind that, more razorribbon. The theory was that the combination of the two would discourage most worms and renegades.
The army generally recommended nine lines of razor-ribbon, separated by eight rows of punji-barriers; the army also recommended trenches and mines where possible, plus robots and field sensors. I didn't have a trench digger and I didn't want to risk planting mines. A robot would be useless here, and sensors are useless if there's no one to watch the monitors.
So far, the statistics showed that the fences worked; even small installations, like this one, were effective enough to justify the expenditure. Some pessimists said that it was only because there were enough other good places to feed that it wasn't yet worth a worm's trouble to plow through the barriers.
The pessimists were probably right, but I'd vote with the statistics for now.
Fortunately, just beyond the hiking ridge the peninsula shrank to a very narrow strip of land, only thirty meters wide. Indeed, the peninsula was only a peninsula because of politics. Family had been designed and built as a long crescent island. It was also supposed to have its own independent government; but the county fathers, fearing the loss of millions of lovely tax dollars had passed an ordinance requiring that all utility cables be accessible above ground. This meant that the builders of the island would have to lay down a connecting strip to the mainland, a narrow connecting tongue of rugged, ugly rocks, and in so doing, would also put Family firmly under the jurisdiction of the aforementioned county parentage. Before the Chtorr had come, the joke had been that the people of Family wanted nothing more than to be orphans. Now the Chtorr had given them their wish. Sort of.
My thought was to put the worm lines down just behind the rocks and hope that no worm would want to cross the rocks and the fence. The rocks were pretty nasty just by themselves. On the other hand, if a worm was determined enough to make it over the rocks, then it probably wasn't going to be stopped by the worm fence either.
Maybe Betty-John was right. Maybe I was being paranoid. And maybe I still woke up in the middle of the night, shivering and thinking of Jason and Orrie and Jessie.
No. I had to vote with the statistics.
I voted with three rows of razor-ribbon and two of punji-that was all we could afford to install-and a heartfelt prayer that it would be enough to deter.
Now, if only the worms would agree with me. We started early in the morning. Tommy and me, Jack and Dove.
Jack Balaban was a dour looking man with a Welsh accent so thick he was nearly incomprehensible half the time. He had a slight stoop to his body, as if life had been beating on him for several decades, but he was surprisingly tender toward Dove.
Dove was a year older and half a head taller than Tommy. He wasn't exactly mute, but preferred to speak in sounds, whistles, and noises instead of words.
When Dove saw a car, he would point and make the shrill whine of a turbine. If he saw a plane or a chopper, he would make appropriate engine sounds. He could describe floaters, boats, jet skis, motorcycles, and off-road vehicles this way. He was also fond of imitating the electronic chime of the telephone, startling people to their feet, until they realized it was only Dove again. His repertoire also included an astonishing range of explosions, warbles, wheeps, and whistles.
Apparently, this skill had rubbed off on Jack, because the two of them had developed their own language of sound effects and conversed not so much in words as in noises.
When I was around, however, both of them shut up. I finally confronted Jack with it.
He shook his head and denied it. "I don't dislike yeh, Jim. I don't like yeh much, but I don't dislike yeh either. Just don't care much either way, I don't."
"Is it something I've done?"
Jack thought about it a moment, stroking his mustache. "Na." He pulled on a pair of thick gloves and picked up a coil of razor-ribbon he had been laying out. He resumed uncoiling it across the grass.