We Chain Men To Posts Out On The Ice Every Night. The Guns Behind Us Wait For One To Scream
Galactic HorrorsShow Notes
For twenty winters he has built the ice at the hockey arena in his Minnesota hometown, and he can tell by sound which ice will carry a man. That is why, when the war stalls on a frozen marsh nearby, the army hands him a ring of keys and the job of walking thirty convicts half a mile out onto the ice each dusk, chaining them by the neck to iron posts, and unlocking whoever is left at dawn.
The convicts are bait for enemy machines that no radar or night scope can detect, machines that want nothing but the living. When one reaches a post and the man there screams, the guns behind the line kill him and the thing together, but the sergeant at the guns fires only on true terror.
Then one morning a collar lies open, its chain cut clean, and nobody heard a scream. The machines have learned to take men in silence, the prison trucks bring fewer convicts each week, and the posts still have to be filled. In the tents behind the guns sleep the men he has known all his life, and he is the one who keeps the list.
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