Leo Frankowski

said.
Ohura’s lungs were too seared for her to speak, but she smiled slightly.
    “Are our babies
all right?” Colleen’s eyes were swollen shut.
    “I’ve got them
all right here. They’re fine. Lady Mona said you two did everything
perfect,” Liebchen said.
    “Oh, good. I
hope Pinecroft’ll be all right,” Colleen said, before putting herself to sleep.
     
    “What’s the
status on the bomber crew?” “Six of the original eight are alive,
my lord. Three of those are capable of talking. Their flight orders were signed by Major
General Hastings, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
    “Hastings,
huh?” Copernick said. “That’s perfect, politically. I want those
three men programmed to make complete confessions to the news media, and I want it done in three hours.
They are to say that they had orders to drop an atomic bomb on American citizens,
and that they
would have done so if their plane had not developed engine trouble. Call
for volunteers among the valley’s citizens. I need all roads out of the valley
blocked by ‘refugees’ for three hours. We need time to set the stage before the newsmen
get here.”
    Guibedo said,
“What do you figure that’s going to accomplish, Heiny?”
    “We were lucky
this tune, and we can’t repeat the performance. Bringing that plane down cost us
five hundred
birds.
    “CCU. See that
all of the birds are cleaned out of the wreckage. I don’t want the government
to know that we have any capability of fighting back. Save any birds that can be saved and…
give the rest an honorable burial.
    “Uncle Martin,
our only hope is to kick up so much political flack that our opponents will wait
a few months before attacking again. And with luck, by then they won’t have anything
to attack with.”
    “Heiny, it’s
time we let our bugs loose.”
    “Do you want the
honor, Uncle Martin?”
    “Yah. Now I
want the honor. Telephone! Do it!”
    In subbasements below their feet, long
ceiling-high racks were filled with white
eggs the size of beachballs, each
connected by a black umbilical cord to the mother— being and by a thin pink string to the CCU.
    The eggs began to
open. By the thousands, full-sized swans broke soundlessly from their shells and
started their
silent, orderly, mindless procession upward. They climbed the wide circular
ramp four hundred feet to the surface, and beyond, through the burned-out shell that was Pinecroft. They
climbed until they were a hundred feet above the ground then dove into the
night air. The great white birds circled high, then each flew off to its own separate
destination.
    Guibedo climbed
Pinecroft. Still a wanted man, he couldn’t attend the press conference at the
auditorium, but he could see the flash of strobes, the milling crowds. None of Copernick’s
creations was in sight. They had been hidden, and the valley’s citizens had been cau tioned not to mention them.
    He could make out the
long line of beds set up near the band shell, an outdoor hospital and morgue.
    Guibedo watched the
swans flying high and away. “Fly high, my pretty friends. Do your job, and this
will never
happen again.”
    Each of the myriad
birds headed to its five-square— mile target zone, then started flying a zigzag pattern. At four-second intervals, it discharged two mosquitoes, one a
shiny aluminum, the other a duller iron. When it had discharged 1,024 of
each insect, it froze in the air, its programming and life completed. It fell to
the ground and became fertilizer for the food-making tree in its breast.
    Each of the
mosquitoes sought out metal. A car, a plane, a tin can. It laid an egg and flew on
to do it again, a thousand times more. And then it died.
    Each egg hatched and grew into a larva
which, in three days’ time, would eat two
ounces of metal and then become a mosquito and lay a thousand eggs of its own.
    They would do this
for eighty generations, and then their short-lived race would become extinct.
Or rather, would try to, for after forty generations there would be neither
iron nor aluminum nor any of their alloys left in an unoxidized state
on Earth.
    Patricia Cambridge
came up and stood at Martin Gui bedo’s side.
    “There were too
many old colleagues at the press conference. It sort of hurt, seeing them again.
We talked, but I wasn’t one of them anymore.”
    “It doesn’t
matter, Patty. The world you knew has ended. Now we will build a better one.”
    Patricia thought he
was talking of love, and snuggled