Smiler had a night nurse, but the first thing Big “C” did when he emerged was to kill him. That’s what we later figured, anyway. The second thing that he did was derail a MIRV bogie on its way through Lakeport. I can’t supply details; I only know he did it.
Normally this wouldn’t matter much: seventy-five percent of the runs were dummies anyway. But this one was the real thing, one of the two or three times a year when the warheads were in position. And it looked like something had got broken in the derailment, because all of the alarms were going off at once!
The place was evacuated. Lakeport, Venus, Clewiston—all the towns around Lake Okeechobee—the whole shoot. Even the Okeechobee Space Center itself, though not in its entirety; a skeleton crew stayed on there; likewise at the La Belle silos. A decon team was made ready to go in and tidy things up…except that didn’t happen. For through all of this activity, Smiler (or rather, Big “C”) had somehow contrived to be forgotten and left behind. And what did happen was that Smiler got on the telephone to Okeechobee and told them to hold off. No one was to move. Nothing was to happen.
“You’d better listen and listen good,” he’d said. “Big ‘C’ has six MIRVs, each one with eight bombs aboard. And he’s got five of them lined up on Washington, London, Tokyo, Berlin and Moscow, though not necessarily in that order. That’s forty nukes for five of the world’s greatest capitals and major cities within radii of two hundred miles. That’s a holocaust, a nuclear winter, the New Dark Age. As for the sixth MIRV: that one’s airborne right now! But it won’t hurt because he hasn’t programmed detonation instructions. It’s just a sign to let you all know that he’s not kidding and can do what he says he can do.”
The MIRV split up north of Jacksonville; bombs came down harmlessly in the sea off Wilmington, Cape Fear, Georgetown, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Cape Canaveral and Palm Beach. After that…while no one was quite sure just exactly who Big ‘C’ was, certainly they all knew he had them by the short and curlies.
Of course, that was when the “news” broke about Smiler’s cancer, the fact that it was different. And the cancer experts from the Lakeport Center, and the space medics, too, arrived at the same conclusion: that somehow alien “radiations” or emanations had changed Smiler’s cancer into Big “C.” The Lakeport doctors and scientists had intended that when it vacated Smiler they’d kill it, but now Big “C” was threatening to kill us, indeed the world. It was then that I remembered how Smiler had credited the thing with intelligence, and now it appeared he’d been right.
So…maybe the problem could have been cleared up right there and then. But at what cost? Big “C” had demonstrated that he knew his way around our weaponry, so if he was going to die why not take us with him? Nevertheless, it’s a fact that there were some itchy fingers among the military brass right about that time.
Naturally, we had to let Moscow, London and all the other target areas in on it, and their reaction was about what was expected:
“For God’s sake—placate the thing! Do as it tells you—whatever it tells you!” And the Sovs said: “If you let anything come out of Florida heading for Moscow, comrades, that’s war!”
And then, of course, there was Smiler himself. Big “C” had Smiler in there—a hero, and one of the greatest of all time. So the hotheads cooled down pretty quickly, and for some little time there was a lot of hard, cold, calculated thinking going on as the odds were weighed. But always it came out in Big “C”’s favor. Oh, Smiler and his offspring were only a small percentage of life on Earth, right enough, and we could stand their loss…but what if we attacked and this monstrous growth actually did press the button before we nailed him? Could he, for instance, monitor incoming hardware from space? No, for he was at Lakeport and the radar and satellite monitoring equipment was at La Belle. So maybe we could get him in a preemptive strike! A lot of fingernails were chewed. But:
Smiler’s next message came out of La Belle, before anybody could make any silly decisions. “Forget it,” he warned us. “He’s several jumps ahead of you. He made me drive him down here, to La Belle. And this is the deaclass="underline" Big ‘C’ doesn’t want to harm anyone—but neither does he want to be harmed. Here at La Belle he’s got the whole world laid out on his screens—his screens, have you got that? The La Belle ground staff—that brave handful of guys who stayed on—they’re…finished. They opposed him. So don’t go making the same mistake. All of this is Big “C”’s now. He’s watching everything from space, on radar…all the skills we had in those areas are now his. And he’s nervous because he knows we kill things that frighten us, and he supposes that he frightens us. So the minute our defense satellites stop cooperating—the very minute he stops receiving information from his radar or pictures from space—he presses the button. And you’d better believe there’s stuff here at La Belle that makes that derailed junk at Lakeport look like Chinese firecrackers!” And of course we knew there was.
So that was it: stalemate, a Mexican standoff. And there were even groups who got together and declared that Big “C” had a right to live. If the Israelis had been given Israel, (they argued) the Palestinians Beirut and the Aborigines Alice Springs all the way out to Simpson Desert, then why shouldn’t Big “C” have Lake Okeechobee? After all, he was a sentient being, wasn’t he? And all he wanted was to live—wasn’t it?
Well, that was something of what he wanted, anyway. Moisture from the lake, and air to breathe. And Smiler, of course.
And territory. A lot more territory.
Big “C” grew fast. Very fast. The word “big” itself took on soaring new dimensions. In a few years Big “C” was into all the lakeside towns and spreading outwards. He seemed to live on anything, ate everything, and thrived on it. And it was about then that we decided we really ought to negotiate boundaries. Except “negotiate” isn’t the right word.
Smiler asked to see me; I went in; through Smiler Big “C” told me what he wanted by way of land. And he got it. You don’t argue with something that can reduce your planet to radioactive ashes. And now that Big “C” was into all the towns and villages on the Lake, he’d moved his nukes in with him. He hadn’t liked the idea of having all his eggs in one basket, as it were.
But between Big “C”’s emergence from Smiler and my negotiating the boundaries, Christ knows we tried to get him! Frogmen had gone up the Miami, Hillsboro, and St Lucie canals to poison the Lake—and hadn’t come down again. A manmade anthrax variant had been sown in the fields and swamps where he was calculated to be spreading—and he’d just spread right on over it. A fire had started “accidentally” in the long hot summer of 2019, in the dried-out Okaloacoochee Slough, and warmed Big “C”’s hide all the way to the Lake before it died down. But that had been something he couldn’t ignore.
“You must be crazy!” Smiler told us that time. “He’s launched an ICBM to teach you a lesson. At ten megs its the smallest thing he’s got—but still big enough!”