Gordon R Dickson -
Dorsai
INTRODUCTION • from David Drake
I don't insist that you believe DORSAI! is the best novel of military SF ever written: one could make a pretty good case for Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS. I will, however, insist that those two-novels (first published within weeks of one another in 1959) are in combination the standard against which the subgenre of military SF must be judged.
Everybody who's attempted a complex task knows that mere are more ways to go wrong than there are to do the job right DORSAI! and STARSHIP TROOPERS are a useful illustration of the diversity nonetheless possible between first-class works, even within a category as narrow as military SF. Heinlein's novel focused on the individual soldier and the social forces that molded him. DORSAI! is an investigation of the problems of high command and the qualities that produce the ideal commander.
The differences in approach aren't so much apples and oranges but rather the drive and driven plates of a clutch: both command and execution are necessary for a military system to work. In my opinion, Dickson and Heinlein have explored these segments of the system not only as well as anybody in the field has done, but as well as anybody is likely ever to do.
DORSAI! is an exposition of what Basil Liddell-Hart termed the Strategy of Indirection. (I do not imply a necessarily direct connection.) Instead of overwhelming one's opponent by brute force, the exponent of indirection maneuvers so that his opponent has to attack or (better yet) is checkmated without a battle.
Liddell-Hart developed his theories as a reaction to the blood-drenched kilting grounds of World War (tee, a conflict that was as perfect an example of the brute force approach and its limitations as one could find. The brute force technique as refined to its quintessential form by Field Marshal Haig involved silencing hostile machine guns by attacking with more infantry than the machine gunners had bullets. (I wish I were exaggerating, but read the accounts.)
Liddell-Hart went further back in history and examined the campaigns of Hannibal, Sherman, and particularly the Byzantine general Belisarius to find an alternative strategy. To defeat an entrenched enemy, maneuver around him and force him to leave his fortifications in order to protect his rear areas. Instead of attacking an enemy, destroy his supplies so mat he has to retreat. Move into a position that the enemy must take (ideally for reasons of perceived honor rather than pragmatic need) and let him waste his strength against your fortifications—until you move out and leave him with a useless shell.
These are the sorts of campaigns that Donal Graeme, the hero of DORSAI!, fights. Anyone who has had the fortune to be involved in the other sort of war will wish that more real-life officers had considered the responsibilities of command as clearly as Dickson did.
DORSAI! is and was conceived as a self-standing novel. Because of the strength of its conception, however, it has become the foundation of one of science fiction's most ambitious and far-ranging constructs, the Childe Cycle. The Cycle is a vast structure, spanning a millennium from the historical 14th century to a fictional future in which the triune aspects of humanity will be united again in a form both superhuman and super-humane.
Much of the Cycle remains to be written still today, more than thirty years after the original publication of DORSAI!, but the pieces of the interlocking whole continue to appear—each excellent in its own right It is a tribute to the structure of the original novel that the conception shown here in microcosm remains valid despite the weight of detail accreting in the later novels.
I've discussed DORSAI! as paradigm: for fiction writers in general, for military professionals, and for viiB
Dickson himself in his later work. None of the above could have touched me when I first read the novel at age 15. (Well, I read THE GENETIC GENERAL; which is not quite the same thing, but almost.)
What struck me and caused me to reread the novel a number of times was mat this is one heck of a good story. It's a model of clean prose, seamless structure, and fast action, hi this too, DQRSAI! is a paradigm— for other writers. But that doesn't have to matter to readers, whether first-timers or (like me the other day) for the umpteenth time.
Dive in and have fun!
David Drake Chatham Country, NC viii
CADET
The boy was odd.
This much he knew for himself. This much he had heard his seniors—his mother, his father, his uncles, the officers at the Academy—mention to each other, nodding their heads confidentially, not once but many times during his short eighteen years of life, leading up to this day. Now, apart, wandering the empty rec fields in this long, amber twilight before returning to his home and the graduation supper awaiting him there, he admitted to the oddness— whether truly in himself, or only in what others thought of him.
"An odd boy," he had overheard the Commandant at the Academy saying once to the Mathematics Officer, "you never know which way he'll jump."
Back at home right now, the family would be wait- ing his return—unsure of which way he would jump. They would be half expecting him to refuse his Outgoing. Why? He had never given them any cause to doubt. He was Dorsai of the Dorsai, his mother a Kenwick, his father a Graeme, names so very old their origin was buried in the prehistory of the Mother Planet. His courage was unquestioned, his word unblemished. He had headed his class. His very blood and bones were the heritage of a long line of great professional soldiers. No blot of dishonor had ever marred that roll of warriors, no home had ever been burnt, its inhabitants scattered and hiding their family shame under new names, because of some failure on the part of one of the family's sons. And yet, they doubted.
He came to the fence that marked off the high hurdles from the jump pits, and leaned on it with both elbows, the tunic of a Senior Cadet pulled tight across his shoulders. In what way was he odd? he wondered into the wide glow of the sunset. How was he different?
He put himself apart from him in his mind's eye, and considered himself. A slim young man of eighteen years—tall, but not tall by Dorsai standards, strong, but not strong by Dorsai standards. His face was the face of his father, sharp and angular, straight-nosed; but without his father's massiveness of bones. His coloring was the dark coloring of the Dorsai, hair straight and black and a little coarse. Only his eyes— those indeterminate eyes that were no definite color but went from gray to green to blue with his shifting moods—were not to be found elsewhere on his fam- ily trees. But surely eyes alone could not account for a reputation of oddness?
There was, of course, his temper. He had inherited, in full measure, those cold, sudden, utterly murderous Dorsai rages which had made his people such that no sane man cared to cross one of them without good reason. But that was a common trait; and if the Dorsai thought of Donal Graeme as odd, it could not be for that alone.
Was it, he wondered now, gazing into the sunset, that even in his rages he was a little too calculating—a little too controlled and remote? And as he thought that thought, all his strangeness, all his oddness came on him with a rush, together with that weird sense of disembodiment that had afflicted him, now and again, ever since his birth.
It came always at moments like mis, riding the shoulders of fatigue and some great emotion. He remembered it as a very young boy in the Academy chapel at evening service, half-faint with hunger after the long day of hard military exercises and harder lesson. The sunset, as now, came slanting in through the high windows on the bare, highly polished walls and the solidographs of famous battles inset in them. He stood among the rows of his classmates between the hard, low benches, the ranked male voices, from the youngest cadet to the deep man-voices of the officers in the rear, riding the deep, solemn notes of the Recessional—that which was known as the Dorsai Hymn now, wherever man had gone, and which a man named Kipling had written the words of, over four centuries before.
. .. Far called, our navies melt away, On dune and headland sinks the fire. Lo! All our pomp of yesterday, Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre ...
As he had remembered it being sung at the burial service when his youngest uncle's ashes had been brought back from the slagged battlefield of Donneswort, on Freiland, third planet circling the star of Sirius.
... For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust, that builds on dust And guarding, calls not thee to guard . . .
And he had sung with the rest, feeling then, as now, the final words in the innermost recesses of his heart.
... For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
A chill shiver ran down his back. The enchantment was complete. Far and wide about him the red and dying light flooded the level land. In the farther sky the black dot of a hawk circled. But here by the fence and the high hurdles, he stood removed and detached, enclosed by some clear, transparent wall that set him apart from all the universe, alone, untouchable and enraptured. The inhabited worlds and their suns sank and dwindled in his mind's eye; and he felt the siren, deadly pull of that ocean of some great, hidden purpose that promised him at once fulfillment and a final dissolution. He stood on its brink and its waves lapped at his feet; and, as always, he strove to lift his foot and step forward into its depths and be lost forever; but some small part of him cried out against the self-destruction and held him back.
Then suddenly—as suddenly as it had come—the spell was broken. He turned toward the craft that would take him home.
As he came to the front entrance, he found his father waiting for him, in the half-shadow leaning with his wide shoulders spread above the slim metal shaft of his cane.
"Be welcome to this house," said his father and straightened up. "You'd better get out of that uniform and into some man's clothes. Dinner will be ready in half an hour."
MAN
The men of the household of Eachan Khan Graeme sat around the long, shimmering slab of the dining board in the long and shadowy room, at their drinking after the women and children had retired. They were not all present, nor—short of a minor miracle— was it ever likely that they would be, in this life. Of sixteen adult males, nine were off at the wars among the stars, one was undergoing reconstructive surgery at the hospital in Omalu, and the eldest, Donal's granduncle, Kamal, was quietly dying in his own room at the back of the household with an oxygen tube up his nose and the faint scent of the bay lilac to remind him of his Maran wife, now forty years dead. Sitting at the table were five—of which, since three o'clock this afternoon—Donal was one. Those others who were present to welcome him to bis adulthood were Eachan, his father; Mor, his elder brother, who was home on leave from the Friendlies; and his twin uncles lan and Kensie, who had been next in age above that James who had died at Donneswort. They sat grouped around the high end of the table, Eachan at its head, with his two sons on his right and his two younger twin brothers on his left.
"They had good officers when I was there," Eachan was saying. He leaned over to till Donal's glass, and Donal took it up automatically, listening with both ears.
"Freilanders all," said lan, the grimmer of the two dark twins. "They run to stiffness of organization without combat to shake them up. Kensie says Mara or Kultis, and I say why not?*'
"They have full companies of Dorsai there, I hear," said Mor, at Donal's right. The deep voice of Eachan answered from his left.
"They're show guards. I know of those. Why make a cake of nothing but icing? The Bond of Kultis likes to think of having an unmatched bodyguard; but they'd be fanned out to the troops fast enough in case of real trouble between the stars.1'
"And meanwhile," put in Kensie, with a sudden smile that split his dark face, "no action. Peacetime soldiering goes sour. The outfits split up into little cliques, the cake-fighters move in and an actual man—a Dorsai—becomes an ornament."
"Good," said Eachan, nodding. Donal swallowed absently from his glass and the unaccustomed whiskey burned fiercely at the back of his nose and throat.
Little pricklings of sweat popped out on his forehead; but he ignored them, concentrating on what was being said. This talk was all for his benefit, he knew. He was a man now, and could no longer be told what to do. The choice was his, about where he would go to take service, and they were helping him with what knowledge they had, of the eight systems and their ways.
"... I was never great for garrison duty myself," Eachan was continuing. "A mercenary's job is to train, maintain and fight; but when all's said and done, the fighting's the thing. Not that everyone's of my mind. There are Dorsal and Dorsal—and not all Dorsal are Graemes."
"The Friendlies, now—" said Mor, and stopped with a glance at his father, afraid that he had interrupted.
"Go on," said Eachan, nodding.
"I was just about to point out," said Mor, "there's plenty of action on Association—and Harmony, too, I hear. The sects will always be fighting against each other. And there's bodyguard work—"
"Catch us being personal gunmen," said lan, who— being closer in age to Mor man Mor's father—did not feel the need to be quite so polite, 'That's no job for a soldier."
"I didn't mean to suggest it," said Mor, turning to his uncle. "But the psalm-singers rate it high among themselves, and that takes some of their best talent. It leaves the field posts open for mercenaries,"
'True enough," said Kensie, equably. "And if they had less fanatics and more officers, those two worlds would be putting strong forces out between the stars. But a priest-soldier is only troublesome when he's more soldier than priest."
"I'll back that," said Mor. "This last skirmish I was in on Association, an elder came down the line after we'd taken one little town and wanted five of my men for hangmen."
"What did you do?" asked Kensie.
"Referred him to my Commandant—and then got to the old man first and told him that if he could find five men in my force who actually wanted such a job, he could transfer them out the next day." lan nodded.
"Nothing spoils a man for battle like playing butcher," he said.
"The old man got that," said Mor. "They got their hangmen, I heard—but not from me."
"The lusts are vampires," said Eachan, heavily, from the head of the table. "Soldiering is a pure art. A man with a taste for blood, money or women was one I never trusted."
"The women are fine on Mara and Kultis," grinned Mor. "I hear."
"I'll not deny it," said Kensie, merrily. "But you've got to come home, some day."
"God grant that you all may," said Eachan, somberly. "I am a Dorsai and a Graeme, but if this little world of ours had something else to trade for the contracts of out-world professionals besides the blood of our best fighting men, I'd be more pleased."
"Would you have stayed home, Eachan," said Mor, "when you were young and had two good legs?"
"No, Mor," said Eachan, heavily. "But mere are other arts, beside the art of war—even for a Dorsai." He looked at his eldest son. "When our forefathers settled this world less than a hundred and fifty years ago, it wasn't with the intention of providing gun-fodder for me other eight systems. They only wanted a world where no man could bend the destinies of another man against that second man's will."
"And that we have," said lan, bleakly.
"And that we have," echoed Eachan. "The Dorsai is a tree world where any man can do as he likes as long as he respects the rights of his neighbor. Not all the other eight systems combined would tike to try their luck with this one world. But the price—the price—" He shook his head and refilled his glass.
"Now those are heavy words for a son who's just going out," said Kensie. "There's a lot of good in life just the way she is now. Beside, it's economic pressures we're under today, not military. Who'd want the Dorsai, anyway, besides us? We're all nut here, and very little kernel. Take one of the rich new worlds—like Ceta under Tau Ceti—or one of the richer, older worlds like Freiland, or Newton—or even old Venus herself. They've got cause to worry. They're the ones that are at each other's throats for the best scientists, the best technicians, the top artists and doctors. And the more work for us and the better life for us, because of it."
"Eachan's right though, Kensie," growled lan. "They still dream of squeezing our free people up into one lump and then negotiating with that lump for the force to get the whip hand over all the other worlds." He leaned forward across the table toward Eachan and in the muted light of the dining room Donal saw the sudden white flash of the seared scar that coiled up his forearm like a snake and was lost in the loose sleeve of his short, undress tunic. "That's the danger we'll never be free of."
"As long as the cantons remain independent of the Council," said Eachan, "and the families remain independent of the cantons, there'll be no success for mem, lan." He nodded at all about the table. "That's my end of the job here at home. You can-go out to the wars with easy consciences. I promise you your children will grow up free in this house—free of any man's will—or the house will no longer stand."
"I trust you," said lan. His eyes were gleaming pale as the scar in the dimness and he was very close to that Dorsai violence of emotion that was at once so cold and so deadly. "I have two boys now under mis roof. But remember no men are perfect—even the Dorsai. There was Mahub Van Ghent only five years back, who dreamed about a little kingdom among the Dorsai in the Midland South—only five years ago, Eachan!"
"He was on the other side of the world," said Eachan. "And he's dead now, at the hand of one of the Benali, his closest neighbor. His home is burnt and no man acknowledges himself a Van Ghent any more. What more do you want?"
"He should have been stopped sooner."
"Each man has a right to his own destiny," said
Eacban, softly. "Until he crosses the line into another man's. His family has suffered enough."
"Yes," said lan. He was calming down. He poured himself another drink. "That's true—that's true. They're not to blame,"
"About the Exotics—" said Mor, gently.
"Oh, yes," answered Kensie, as if the twin brother that was so much a part of himself had never gotten excited at all. "Mara and Kultis—interesting worlds. Don't mistake them if you ever go there, Mor—or you either, Donal. They're sharp enough, for all their art and robes and trappings. They won't fight themselves, but they know how to hire good men. There's things being done on Mara and Kultis—and not only in the arts. Meet one of their psychologists, one time."
"They're honest," said Eachan.
"That, too," said Kensie. "But what catches at me is the fact they're going some place, in their own way. If I had to pick one of the other worlds to be born on—"
"I would always be a soldier," said Mor.
"You think so now," said Kensie, and drank. "You think so now. But it's a wild civilization we have nowadays, with its personality split a dozen different ways by a dozen different cultures. Less than five hundred years ago the average man never dreamed of getting his feet off the ground. And the farther we go the faster. And the faster the farther."
"It's the Venus group forcing that, isn't it?" asked
Donal, his youthful reticence all burnt away in the hot fumes of the whiskey.
"Don't you think it," said Kensie. "Science is only one road to the future. Old Venus, Old Mars— Cassida, Newton—maybe they've had their day. Project Blaine's a rich and powerful old man, but he doesn't know all the new tricks they're dreaming up on Mara and Kultis, or the Friendlies—or Ceta, for that matter. Make it a point to take two good looks at things when you get out among the stars, you two young ones, because nine times out of ten that first glance will leave you fooled."
"Listen to him, boys," said Eachan from the top of the table. "Your uncle Kensie's a man and a half above the shoulders. I just wish I had as good advice to give you. Tell them, Kensie."
"Nothing stands still," said Kensie—and with those three words, the whiskey seemed to go to Donal's head in a rush, the table and the dark harsh-boned faces before him seemed to swim in the dimness of the dining room, and Kensie's voice came roaring at him as if from a great distance. "Everything changes, and that's what you must bear in mind. What was true yesterday about something may not be true today. So remember that and take no man's word about something without reservation, even mine. We have multiplied like the biblical locusts and spread out among the stars, splitting into different groups with different ways. Now, while we still seem to be rushing forward to where I have no idea, at a terrific rate, increasing all the time, I have this feeling—as if we are all poised, hanging on the brink of something, something great and different and maybe terrible. It's a time to walk cautious, it is indeed."
"I'll be the greatest general that ever was!" cried Donal, and was startled as the rest to hear the words leap, stumbling and thick-tongued, but loud, from within him. "They'll see—I'll show them what a Dorsai can be!"
He was aware of them looking at him, though all their faces were blurred, except—by some trick of vision—that of Kensie, diagonally across the table from him. Kensie was considering him with somber, reading eyes. Donal was conscious of his father's hand on his shoulder.
"Time to turn in," said his father.
"You'll see—" said Donal, thickly. But they were all rising, picking up their glasses and turning to his father, who held his own glass up.
"May we all meet again," said his father. And they drank, standing. The remains of the whiskey in his glass flowed tasteless as water down Donal's tongue and throat—and for a second everything cleared and be saw these tall men standing around him. Big, even for Dorsai, they were; even his brother Mor topping him by half a head, so that he stood like a half-grown boy among them. But at that same instant of vision he was suddenly wrung with a terrible tenderness and pity for them, as if he was the grown one, and they the children to be protected. He opened his mouth to say, for once in his life, how much he loved them, and how always he would be there to take care of them—and then the fog closed down again; and he was only aware of Mor leading him stumblingly to his room.
Later, he opened his eyes in the darkness to become aware of a dim figure drawing the curtains of his room against the bright new light of the double moon, just risen. It was his mother; and with a sudden, reflexive action he rolled off his bed and lurched to her and put his hands on her shoulders.
"Mother—" he said.
She looked up at him with a pale face softened by the moonlight.
"Donal," she said tenderly, putting her arms around him. "You'll catch cold, Donal."
"Mother—" he said, thickly. "If you ever need me ... to take care of you—"
"Oh, my boy," she said, holding his hard young body tightly to her, "take care of yourself; my boy ... my boy—"
MERCENARY
Donal shrugged his shoulders in the tight civilian half-jacket and considered its fit as reflected in the mirror of his tiny, boxlike cabin. The mirror gave him back the image of someone almost a stranger. So much difference had three short weeks brought about in him, already. Not that he was so different, but his own appraisal of himself had changed; so that it was not merely the Spanish-style jacket, the skintight under-tunic, and the narrow trousers that disappeared into boots as black as all the rest of the costume, that made him unfamiliar to himself—but the body within. Association with the men of other worlds had done this to his point of view. Their relative shortness had made him tall, their softness had made him hard, their untrained bodies had made his balanced and sure. Outbound from the Dorsai to Alpha
Centauri and surrounded by other Dorsai passengers, he had not noticed the gradual change. Only in the vast terminal on Newton, surrounded by their noisy thousands, had it come on him, all at once. And now, transhipped and outbound for the Friendlies, facing his first dinner on board a luxury-class liner where there would probably be no others from his world, he gazed at himself in the mirror and felt himself as suddenly come of age.
He went out through the door of his cabin, letting it latch quietly behind him, and turned right in the tightly narrow, metal-walled corridor faintly stale with the smell of dust from the carpet underfoot. He walked down its silence toward the main lounge and pushed through a heavy sealing door that sucked shut behind him, into the corridor of the next section.
He stepped into the intersection of the little cross corridor that led right and left to the washrooms of the section ahead—and almost strode directly into a slim, tall girl in an ankle-length, blue dress of severe and conservative cut, who stood by the water fountain at the point of the intersection. She moved hastily back out of his way with a little intake of breath, backing into the corridor to the women's washroom. They stared at each other, halted, for a second.
"Forgive me," said Donal, and took two steps onward—but between these and a third, some sudden swift prompting made him change his mind without warning; and he turned back.
"If you don't mind—" he said.
"Oh, excuse me." She moved back again from the water fountain. He bent to drink; and when he raised his head from the fountain, he looked her full in the face again and recognized what had brought him back. The girl was frightened; and that strange, dark ocean of feeling that lay at the back of his oddness had stirred to the gust of her palpable fear.
He saw her now, clearly and at once; at close range. She was older than he had thought at first—at least in her early twenties. But there was a clear-eyed immaturity about her—a hint that her full beauty would come later in life, and much later than that of the usual woman. Now, she was not yet beautiful; merely wholesome-looking. Her hair was a light brown, verging into chestnut, her eyes wide-spaced and so clearly green that, opening as she felt the full interest of his close gaze, they drove all the other color about her from his mind. Her nose was slim and straight, her mourn a little wide, her chin firm; and the whole of her face so perfectly in balance, the left side with the right, that it approached the artificiality of some sculptor's creation.
"Yes?" she said, on a little gasping intake of breath—and he saw, suddenly, that she was shrinking from him and his close survey of her.
He frowned at her. His thoughts were galloping ahead with the situation, so that when he spoke, it was unconsciously in the middle of me conversation he had in mind, rather than at the beginning. "Tell me about it," said Donal. "You?" she said. Her hand went to her throat above the high collar of her dress. Then, before he could speak again, it fell to her side and some of the tightness leaked out of her. "Oh," she said. "I see."
"See what?" said Donal, a little sharply; for unconsciously he had fallen into the tone he would have used to a junior cadet these last few years, if he had discovered one of them in some difficulty. "You'll have to tell me what your trouble is, if I'm going to be any help to you."
'Tell you—?" she looked desperately around her, as if expecting someone to come upon them at any moment "How do I know you're what you say you are?"
For the first time Donal check-reined the horses of his galloping estimate of the situation; and, looking back, discovered a possible misconception on her part
"I didn't say I was anybody," he answered. "And in fact—I'm not I just happened to be passing by and saw you seemed upset about something. I offered to help."
"Help?" Her eyes widened again and her face suddenly paled. "Oh, no—" she murmured, and tried to go around him. "Please let me go. Please!"
He stood his ground.
"You were ready to accept help from someone like me, if he could only provide proofs of identity, a second ago," said Donal. "You might as well tell me the rest of it."
That stopped her efforts to escape. She stiffened, facing him.
"I haven't told you anything."
"Only," said Donal, ironically, "that you were waiting here for someone. That you did not know that someone by sight, but expected him to be a man. And that you were not sure of his bona fides, but very much afraid of missing him." He heard the hard edge in his own voice and forced it to be more gentle. "Also that you're very frightened and not very experienced at what you're doing. Logic could take it further."
But she had herself under control now. "Will you move out of the way and let me by?" she said evenly. "Logic might make it that what you're engaged in is something illegal," he replied.
She sagged under the impact of his last word as if it had been a blow; and, turning her face blindly to the wall, she leaned against it.
"What are you?" she said brokenly. "Did they send you to trap me?"
"I tell you," said Donal, with just a hint of exasperation, "Fm nothing but a passer-by who thought maybe I could help."
"Oh, I don't believe you!" she said, twisting her face away from him. "If you're really nobody ... if nobody sent you ... you'll let me go. And forget you ever saw me."
"Small sense in that," said Donal. "You need help evidently. I'm equipped to give it. I'm a professional soldier. A Dorsai."
"Oh," she said. The tension drained from her. She stood straighter and met his eyes with a look in which he thought he read some contempt. '"One of those."
"Yes," he said. Then frowned. "What do you mean one of thoseT
"I understand," she answered. "You're a mercenary."
"I prefer the term professional soldier," he said—a little stiffly in his turn.
"The point is," she said, "you're for hire."
He felt himself growing cold and angry. He inclined his head to her and stepped back, leaving her way clear. "My mistake," he said, and turned to leave her.
"No, wait a minute," she said. "Now that I know what you really are, there's no reason why I can't use you."
"None at all, of course," said Donal.
She reached in through a slit in her tight gown and produced a small, thick folding of some printed matter, which she pushed into his hand.
"You see this is destroyed," she said. "I'll pay you—whatever the usual rates are." Her eyes widened suddenly as she saw him unfold what he held and start to read it. "What are you going? You aren't supposed to read that! How dare you!"
She grabbed for the sheet, but he pushed her back absently with one hand. His gaze was busily running down the form she had given him, his own eyes widening at the sight of the facsimile portrait on it, which was that of the girl herself.
"Anea Marlivana," he said. "Select of Kultis." J "Well, what if I am?" she blazed. "What about it?" - "Only," said Donal, "that I expected your genes to £ imply intelligence."
Her mouth fell open.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Only that you're one of the worst fools I've had the bad fortune to meet." He put the sheet into his pocket. "I'll take care of it."
"You will?" Her face lit up. A second later it was twisted in wrath. "Oh, I don't like you!" she cried. "I don't like you at all!"
He looked at her a little sadly.
"You will," he said, "if you live long enough." He turned about and pushed open the door through which he had come just a few minutes ago.
"But wait a minute—" her voice leaped after him. "Where will I see you after you've got rid of it? How much do I have to pay—"
He let the door, sucking to behind him, be the period to that question of hers—and his answer to it.
He went back through the section he had just traversed to his own cabin. There., with the door locked he considered the sheet she had given him, a little more closely. It was nothing more—and nothing less—than a five-year employment contract, a social contract, for her services as companion in the entourage of William, Prince, and Chairman of the Board of that very commercial planet Ceta which was the only habitable world circling the sun Tau Ceti. And a very liberal social contract it was, requiring no more than that she accompany William wherever he wished to go and supply her presence at such public and polite social functions as he might require. It was not the Hberalness of the contract that surprised him so much—a Select of Kultis would hardly be contracted to perform any but the most delicately moral and ethical of duties—but the fact that she had asked him to destroy it. Theft of contract from her employer was bad enough, breach of contract infinitely worse—calling for complete rehabilitation—but destruction of contract required the death penalty wherever any kind of government operated. The girl, he thought, must be insane.
But—and here the fine finger of irony intruded into the situation—being the Select of Kultis she could not possibly be insane, any more than an ape could be an elephant. On the extreme contrary, being die product of a number of the most carefully culled forebearers on that planet where careful genetic culling and wizardry of psychological techniques was commonplace, she must be eminently sane. True, she had impressed Donal on first acquaintance as possessing nothing much out of the ordinary except a suicidal foolishness. But this was one instance where you had to go by the record books. And the record books implied that if anything about this business was abnormal, it was the situation itself, and not the girl involved in it.
Thoughtfully, Donal fingered the contract. Anea had clearly had no conception at all of what she was requesting when she so blithely required him to destroy it. The single sheet he held, and even the words and signatures upon it, were all integral parts of a single giant molecule which in itself was well-nigh indestructible and could not be in any way altered or tampered with short of outright destruction. As for destruction itself—Donal was quite sure that there was nothing aboard this ship that could in any way burn, shred, dissolve, or in any other fashion obliterate it. And the mere possession of it by anyone but William, its rightful owner, was as good as an order of sentence.
A soft chime quivered on the air of his cabin, announcing the serving of a meal in the main lounge. It chimed twice more to indicate that this was the third of the four meals interspersed throughout the ship "day." Contract in hand, Donal half-turned toward the little orifice of the disposal slot that led down to the central incinerator. The incinerator, of course, was not capable of disposing of the contract—but it might be that it could lie unnoticed there until the ship had reached its destination and its passengers had dispersed. Later, it would be difficult for William to discover how it had reached the incinerator in the first place.
Then he shook his head, and replaced the contract in his pocket. His motives for doing so were not entirely clear to himself. It was that oddness of his at work again, he thought. Also, he told himself that it seemed a sloppy way of handling the situation this girl had got him into. Quite typically, he had already forgotten that his participation in the matter was all of his own contriving.
He straightened his half-jacket and went out of his cabin and down the long corridor through various sections to the main lounge. A slight crowding of likewise dinner-bound passengers in the narrow en- trance to the lounge delayed him momentarily; and, in that moment, looking over the heads of those before him, he caught sight of the long captain's table at the far end of the lounge and of the girl, Anea Marlivana, amongst those seated at it.
The others seated with her appeared to consist of a strikingly handsome young officer of field rank—a Freilander, by the look of him—a rather untidy, large young man almost as big as the Freilander, but possessing just the opposite of the other's military bearing; in fact, he appeared to half-slouch in his seat as if he were drunk. And a spare, pleasant-looking man in early middle age with iron-gray hair. The fifth person at the table was quite obviously a Dorsai—a massive, older man in the uniform of a Freiland marshal. The sight of this last individual moved Donal to sudden action. He pushed abruptly through the little knot of people barring the entrance and strode openly across the room to the high table. He extended his fist across it to the Dorsai marshal.
"How do you do, sir," he said. "I was supposed to look you up before the ship lifted; but I didn't have time. I've got a letter for you from my father, Eachan Khan Graeme. I'm his second son, Donal."
Blue Dorsai eyes as cold as river water lifted under thick gray brows to consider him. For pan of a second the situation trembled on the balance-point of Dorsai pride with the older man's curiosity weighed against the bare-faced impudence of Donal's claim to acquaintance. Then the marshal took Donal's fist in a hard grip.
"So he remembered Hendrik Gait, did he?" the marshal smiled. "I haven't heard from Eachan for years."
Donal felt a slight, cold shiver of excitement course down his spine. Of all people, he had chosen one of the ranking Dorsai soldiers of his day to bluff acquaintance with. Hendrik Gait, First Marshal of Freiiand.
"He sends you his regards, sir," said Donal, "and ... but perhaps I can bring you the letter after dinner and you can read it for yourself."
'To be sure," said the marshal. "I'm in Stateroom Nineteen."
Donal was still standing. The occasion could hardly be prolonged further. But rescue came—as something in Donal had more than half-expected it would—from farther down the table.
"Perhaps," said the gray-haired man in a soft and pleasant voice, "your young friend would enjoy eating with us before you take him back to your stateroom, Hendrik?"
"I'd be honored," said Donal, with glib promptness. He pulled out the empty float before him and sat down upon it, nodding courteously to the rest of the company at the table as he did so. The eyes of the girl met him from the table's far end. They were as hard and still as emeralds caught in the rock.
MERCENARY II
"Anea Marlivana," said Hendrik Gait, introducing Donal around the table. "And the gentleman who was pleased to invite you—William of Ceta, Prince and Chairman of the Board."
"Greatly honored," murmured Donal, inclining his bead toward them.
"... The Unit Commandant, here, my adjutant... Hugh Killien—"
Donal and the Commandant Freilander nodded to each other.
"... And ArDell Montor, of Newton." The loose-Limbed young man slumping in his float, lifted a careless, half-drunken hand in a slight wave of acknowledgment. His eyes—so dark as to appear almost black under the light eyebrows that matched his rather heavy, blond hair, cleared for a disconcerting fraction of a second to stare sharply at Donal, then faded back to indifference. "ArDell," said Gait, humorlessly, "set a new high score for the competitive exams on Newton. His field was social dynamics."
"Indeed," muttered the Newtonian, with something between a snort and a laugh. "Indeed, was. Was, indeed." He lifted a heavy tumbler from the table before him and buried his nose in its light golden contents.
"ArDell—" said the gray-haired William, gently reproving. ArDell lifted his drink-pale face and stared at the older man, snorted again, on laughter, and lifted the tumbler again to his lips.
"Are you enlisted somewhere at the moment, Graeme?" asked the Freilander, turning to Donal.
"I've a tentative contract for the Friendlies," said Donal. "I thought I'd pick between the Sects when I got there and had a chance to look over the opportunities for action."
"Very Dorsai of you," said William, smiling, from the far end of the table, next to Anea. "Always the urge to battle."
"You over-compliment me, sir," said Donal. "It merely happens that promotion comes more quickly on a battlefield than in a garrison, under ordinary conditions.
"You're too modest," said William.
"Yes, indeed," put in Anea, suddenly. "Far too modest."
William turned about to gaze quizzically at the girl.
"Now, Anea," he said. "You mustn't let your Exotic contempt for violence breed a wholly unjustified contempt for this fine young man. I'm sure both Hendrik and Hugh agree with him."
"Oh, they would—of course," said Anea, flashing a look at the other two men. "Of course, they would!"
"Well," said William, laughing, "we must make allowances for a Select, of course. As for myself, I must admit to being male enough, and unreconstructed enough, to like the thought of action, myself. I ... ah, here comes the food."
Brimming soup plates were rising above the surface of the table in front of everybody but Donal.
"You'd better get your order in now," said William. And, while Donal pressed the communicator key before him and attended to this necessary duty, the rest of them lifted their spoons and began their meal.
"... Donal's father was a classmate of yours, was he, Hendrik?" inquired William, as the fish course was being served.
"Merely a close friend," said the marshal, dryly.
"Ah," said William, delicately lifting a portion of the white, delicate flesh on a fork. "I envy you Dorsai for things like that. Your professions allow you to keep friendship and emotional connections unrelated to your work. In the Commercial area"—he gestured with a slim, tanned hand—"a convention of general friendliness obscures the deeper feelings."
"Maybe it's what the man is to begin with," answered the marshal. "Not all Dorsal are soldiers, Prince, and not all Cetans are entrepreneurs."
"I recognize that," said William. His eyes strayed to Donal. "What would you say, Donal? Are you a simple mercenary soldier, only, or do you find yourself complicated by other desires?"
The question was as blunt as it was obliquely put. Donal concluded that ingenuousness overlaid with a touch of venality was perhaps the most proper response.
"Naturally, I'd like to be famous," he said—and laughed a trifle self-consciously, "and rich."
He caught the hint of a darkening cloud on the brow of Gait. But he could not be concerned with that now. He had other fish to fry. There would, he hoped, be a chance to clear up the marshal's contempt for him at some later time. For the present he must seem self-seeking enough to arouse William's interest.
"Very interesting," said William, pleasantly. "How do you plan to go about becoming these pleasant things?"
"I was hoping," said Donal, "maybe to learn something of the worlds by being out among them— something I might be able to use to my own advantage, as well as others."
"Good Lord, is that all?" said the Freilander, and (aughed in a way that invited the rest of the table to join in with him.
William, however, did not laugh—although Anea joined her own clear amusement to that of the commandant, and ArDell's snorted chuckle.
"No need to be unkind, Hugh," he said. "I like Donal's attitude. I had the same sort of notion myself once—when I was younger." He smiled in a kindly fashion on Donal. "You must come talk to me, too," he said, "after you've had your chat with Hendrik. I like young men with ambition."
ArDell snorted with laughter again. William turned to look sadly at him.
"You should try to eat, ArDell," he said. "We'll be making a phase shift in four hours or so; and if you don't have something solid on your stomach—"
"My stomach?" said the young man, drunkenly. "And what if my stomach should reach universal dimensions, out of phase? What if / should reach universal dimensions; and be everywhere and never come back to point position again?" He grinned at Williams. "What a waste of good food."
Anea had paled to a sickly color.
"If you'll excuse me—" she murmured, rising hastily.
"I don't blame you a bit!" said William sharply. "ArDell, that was in inexcusable bad taste. Hugh, help Anea to her stateroom."
"I don't want him!" flared Anea. "He's just like all the rest of you—"
But the Freilander was already on his feet, looking almost like a recruiting poster in his trim uniform and coming around the table to take her arm. She jerked away from him, turned, and went unsteadily out of the lounge. Hugh following closely behind her.
They passed through the doorway into the corridor, but as they turned to move out of sight, Donal saw her turn to the tall soldier and lean into the protection of his arm, just before they disappeared.
William was continuing to speak calm and acid words of disapprobation to ArDell, who made no retort, but gazed drunkenly and steadily back at him out of his black, unmoving eyes. During the rest of the meal the talk turned to military affairs, in particular field strategy, in which triologue—ArDell pointedly excluded—Donal was able to win back some of the personal credit which his earlier remark about fame and riches had cost him—in the marshal's eyes.
"... Remember," William said, as they parted in the corridor outside the lounge, after the meal. "Come in and see me after you've finished with Hendrik, Donal. I'll be glad to help you if I can." And with a smile, and a nod, he turned away.
Donal and Gait went off down the narrow corridor .that forced them to walk one behind the other. Following the thick shoulders of the older man, Donal was surprised to hear him ask: "Well, what do you think of them?"
"Sir?" said Donal. Hesitating, he chose what he took to be the safest subject. "I'm a little surprised about the girl."
"Anea?" said Gaft, stopping before a door marked with the number nineteen.
"I thought a Select of Kultis would be—" Donal stopped, honestly at a loss, "more ... more in control of herself."
"She's very healthy, very normal, very intelligent— but those are only potentialities," retorted the marshal, almost gruffly. "What did you expect?"
He threw open the door, ushered them both in, and closed the door firmly behind them. When he turned around, there was a harder, more formal note to his voice.
"All right now," he said, sharply, "what's ail this about a letter?"
Donal took a deep breath. He had tried hard to read Gait's character during the course of the dinner—and he staked everything now in the honesty of his answer, on what he thought he had seen there.
"No letter, sir," he said. 'To the best of my knowledge, my father never met you in his life."
"Thought as much," said Gait. "All right—what's it all about, then?" He crossed to a desk on the other side of the room, took something from a drawer, and when he turned about Donal was astonished to find him filling an antique pipe _ with tobacco.
"That Anea, sir," he said. "I never met such a foot in my life." And he told, fully and completely, the story of the episode in the corridor. Gait half-sat on the edge of the desk, the pipe in his mouth now, and alight, puffing little clouds of white smoke which the ventilating system whisked away the second they were formed.
"I see," he said, when Donal had finished. "I'm inclined to agree with you. She is a fool. And just what sort of insane idiot do you consider yourself?"
"I, sir?" Donal was honestly astonished.
"I mean you, boy," said Gait, taking the pipe out of his mouth. "Here you are, still damp from school, and sticking your nose into a situation a full planetary government'd hesitate at." He stared in frank amazement at Donal. "Just what did you think— what did you figure ... hell, boy, what did you plan to get out of it?"
"Why, nothing," said Donal. "I was only interested in seeing a ridiculous and possibly dangerous situation smoothed out as neatly as possible. I admit I hadn't any notion of the part William played in the matter—he's apparently an absolute devil."
The pipe rattled in Gait's suddenly unclenched jaws and he had to grab it quickly with one thick hand to keep it from falling. He took it from his lips and stared in amazement at Donal.
"Who told you that?" he demanded.
"No one," said Donal. "It's obvious, isn't it?" Gait laid his pipe down on the table and stood up.
"Not to ninety-nine per cent of the civilized worlds, it isn't," he retorted. "What made it so obvious to you?"
"Certainly," said Donal, "any man can be judged by the character and actions of the people with which, he surrounds himself. And this William has an entourage of thwarted and ruined people."
The marshal stiffened.
"You mean me?" he demanded.
"Naturally not," said Donal. "After all—you're a Dorsai." The stiffness went out of Gait. He grinned a little sourly and, reaching back for his pipe, retrieved and relit it.
"Your faith in our common origin is ... quite re- freshing," he said. "Go on. On this piece of evidence you read William's character, do you?"
"Oh, not just that," said Donal. "Stop and think of the fact that a Select of Kultis finds herself at odds with him. And the good instincts of a Select are inbred. Also, he seems to be an almost frighteningly brilliant sort of man, in that he can dominate personalities like Anea, and this fellow Montor, from Newton—who must be a rather high-level mind himself to have rated as he did on his tests."
"And someone that brilliant must be a devil?" queried Gait, dryly.
"Not at all," explained Donal, patiently. "But having such intellectual capabilities, a man must show proportionately greater inclinations toward either good or evil than lesser people. If he tends toward evil, he may mask it in himself—he may even mask its effect on the people with which he surrounds himself. But he has no way of producing the reflections of good which would ordinarily be reflected from his lieutenants and initiates—and which, if he was truly good—he would have no reason to try and hide. And by that lack, you can read him."
Gait took the pipe from his mouth and gave a long, slow whistle. He stared at Donal.
"You weren't brought up on one of the Exotics, by any chance, were you?" he asked.
"No, sir," said Donal. "My father's mother was a Maran, though. And my mother's mother was Ma-ran."
"This," Gait paused and tamped thoughtfully in the bowl of his pipe—it had gone out—with one thick forefinger, "business of reading character—did you get this from your mother, or your grandmother—or is it your own idea?"
"Why, I imagine I must have heard it somewhere," replied Donal. "But surely it stands to reason— anyone would arrive at it as a conclusion, with a few minutes' thought."
"Possibly the majority of us don't think," said Gait, with the same dryness. "Sit down, Donal. And I'll join you."
They took a couple of armchair floats facing each other. Gait put his pipe away.
"Now, listen to me," he said, in a low and sober voice. "You're one of the oddest young fish I can remember meeting. I don't know quite what to do with you. If you were my son, I'd pack you up in quarantine and ship you home for ten more years seasoning before I let you out among the stars—all right—" he interrupted himself abruptly, raising a silencing hand as Donal's mouth opened. "I know you're a man now and couldn't be shipped anywhere against your will. But the way you strike me now is that you've got perhaps one chance in a thousand of becoming something remarkable, and about nine hundred and ninety-nine chances of being quietly put out of the way before the year's out. Look, boy, what do you know about the worlds, outside the Dorsai?"
"Well," said Donal. "There are fourteen planetary governments not counting the anarchic setups on Dunnin's World and Coby—"
"Governments, my rear echelon!" interrupted Gait, rudely. "Forget your civics lessons! Governments in this twenty-fourth century are mere machinery. It's the men who control them who count. Project Blaine, on Venus; Sven Holman, on Earth; Eldest Bright on Harmony, the very planet we're headed for—and Sayona the Bond on Kultis, for the Exotics."
"General Kamal—" began Donal.
"Is nothing!" said Gait, sharply. "How can the Elector of the Dorsai be anything when every little canton hangs to its independence with tooth and nail? No, I'm talking about the men who pull the strings between the stars. The ones I mentioned, and others." He took a deep breath. "Now, how do you suppose our Merchant Prince and Chairman of the Board on Ceta ranks with those I mentioned?"
"You'd say he's their equal?
"At least," said Gait. "At least. Don't be led astray by the fact that you see him traveling like this, on a commercial ship, with only the girl and Montor with him. Chances are he owns the ship, the crew and officers—and half the passengers."
"And you and the commandant?" asked Donal, perhaps more bluntly than was necessary. Gait's features started to harden; and then he relaxed.
"A fair question," he rumbled. "I'm trying to get you to question most of the things you've taken for granted. I suppose it's natural you'd include myself. No—to answer your question—I am First Marshal of Freiland, still a Dorsai, and with my professional services for hire, and nothing more. We've just hired out five light divisions to the First Dissident Church, on Harmony, and I'm coming along to observe that they operate as contracted for. It's a complicated deal—like they are all—involving a batch of contract credits belonging to Ceta. Therefore William."
"And the commandant?" persisted Donal.
"What about him?" replied Gait. "He's a Freilander, a professional, and a good one. He'll take over one of the three-Force commands for a short test period when we get to Harmony, for demonstration purposes."
"Have you had him with you long?"
"Oh, about two standard years," said Gait.
"And he's good, professionally?"
"He's damn good," said Gait. "Why do you think he's my adjutant? What're you driving at, anyway?"
"A doubt," said Donal, "and a suspicion." He hesitated for a second. "Neither of which I'm ready to voice yet."
Gait laughed.
"Save that Maran character-sniffing of yours for civilians," he said. "You'll be seeing a snake under every bush. Take my word for it, Hugh's a good, honest soldier—a bit flashy, perhaps—but that's all."
"I'm hardly in a position to argue with you," murmured Donal, stepping aside gracefully. "You were about to say something about William, when I interrupted you?"
"Oh yes," said Gait. He frowned. "It adds up to this—and I'll make it short and clear. The girl's none of your business; and William's deadly medicine. Leave them both alone. And if I can help you to the kind of post you're after—"
"Thank you very much," said Donal. "But I believe William will be offering me something."
Gait blinked and stared.
"Hell's breeches, boy!" he exploded after half a second. "What gives you that idea?"
Donal smiled a little sadly.
"Another one of my suspicions," he said. "Based on what you call that Maran character-sniff ing of mine, no doubt." He stood up. "I appreciate your trying to warn me, sir." He extended his fist. "If I could talk to you again, sometime?"
Gait stood up himself, taking the proffered fist, mechanically.
"Any time," he said. "Damned if I understand you."
Donal peered at him, .suddenly struck by a thought.
"Tell me, sir," he asked. "Would you say I was— odd?"
"Odd!" Gait almost exploded on the word. "Odd as—" his imagination failed him. "What makes you ask that?"
"I just wondered," said Donal. "I've been called that so often. Maybe they were right."
He withdrew his fist from the marshal's grasp. And on that note, he took his leave.
MERCENARY III
Returning again up the corridor toward the bow of the ship, Donal allowed himself to wonder, a little wistfully, about this succubus of his own strange difference from other people. He had thought to leave it behind with his cadet uniform. Instead, it seemed, it continued to ride with him, still perched on his shoulders. Always it had been this way. What seemed so plain, and simple and straightforward to himself, had always struck others as veiled, torturous, and involved. Always he had been like a stranger passing through a town, the ways of whose people were different, and who looked on him with a lack of understanding amounting to suspicion. Their language failed on the doorstep of his motives and could not enter the lonely mansion of his mind. They said "enemy" and "friend"; they said "strong" and "weak"—
"them" and "us". They set up a thousand arbitrary classifications and distinctions which he could not comprehend, convinced as he was that all people were only people—and there was very little to choose between them. Only, you dealt with them as individuals, one by one; and always remembering to be patient. And if you did this successfully, then the larger, group things all came out right.
Turning again into the entrance of the lounge, he discovered—as he had half-expected to—the young Newtonian ArDell Montor, slumped in a float by one end of the bar that had made its appearance as soon as the dinner tables had been taken up into the walls. A couple of other small, drinking groups sparsely completed the inhabitants of the lounge—but none of these were having anything to do with Montor. Donal walked directly to him; and Montor, without moving, lifted the gaze of his dark eyes to watch Donal approach.
"Join you?" said Donai.
"Honored," replied the other—not so much thickly as slowly, from the drink inside him. "Thought I might like to talk to you." His fingers crept out over the buttons on the bar-pad next to him. "Drink?"
"Dorsai whiskey," said Donal. Montor pressed. A second later a small transparent goblet, full, rose to the bartop. Donal took it and sipped cautiously. The drinking the night he had attained his majority had acquainted him with the manner in which alcohol affected him; and he had made a private determination never to find himself drunk again. It is a typical matter of record with him, that he never did. Raising his eyes from the glass, he found the Newtonian staring steadily at him with his eyes unnaturally clear, lost, and penetrating.
"You're younger than I," said ArDell. "Even if I don't look it. How old do you think I am?"
Donal looked him over curiously. Montor's face, for all its lines of weariness and dissipation, was the scarcely mature visage of a late adolescent—a situation to which his shock of uncombed hair and the loose-limbed way he sprawled in his float, contributed.
"A quarter of a standard century," said Donal.
'Thirty-three years absolute," said ArDell. "I was a school-child, a monk, until I was twenty-nine. Do you think I drink too much?"
"I think there's no doubt about it," answered Donal.
"I agree with you," said ArDell, with one of his sudden snorts of laughter. "I agree with you. There's no doubt about it—one of the few things in this God-abandoned universe about which there is no doubt. But that's not what I was hoping to talk to you about."
"What was that?" Donal tasted his glass of whiskey again.
"Courage," said ArDell, looking at him with an empty, penetrating glance. "Have you got courage?"
"It's a necessary item for a soldier," said Donal. "Why do you ask?"
"And no doubts? No doubts?" ArDell swirled the golden drink in his tall tumbler and took a swallow from it. "No secret fears that when the moment comes your legs will weaken, your heart will pound, you'll turn and run?"
"I will not, of course, turn and run," said Donal. "After all, I'm a Dorsai. As for how 1*11 feel—all I can say is, I've never felt the way you describe. And even if I did—"
Above their heads a single mellow chime sounded, interrupting.
"Phase shift in one standard hour and twenty minutes," announced a voice. "Phase shift in one standard hour and twenty minutes. Passengers are advised to take their medication now and accomplish the shift while asleep, for their greatest convenience."
"Have you swallowed a pill yet?" asked- ArDeli.
"Not yet," said Donal.
"But you will?"
"Of course." Donal examined him with interest. "Why not?"
"Doesn't taking medication to avoid the discomfort, of a phase shift strike you as a form of cowardice?" asked ArDell. "Doesn't it?"
"That's foolish," said Donal. "Like saying it's cowardly to wear clothes to keep you warm and comfortable, or to eat, to keep from starving. One is a matter of convenience; the other is a matter of—he thought for a second—"duty."
"Courage is doing your duty?"
"... In spite of what you personally might want. Yes," said Donal.
"Yes," said ArDell, thoughtfully. "Yes." He replaced his empty glass on the bar and pressed for a refill. "I thought you had courage," he said, musingly, watching the glass sink, fill, and begin to re-emerge.
"I am a Dorsai," said Donal.
"Oh, spare me the glories of careful breeding!" said ArDel], harshly, picking up his now-full glass. As he turned back to face Donal, Donal saw the man's face was tortured. "There's more to courage than that. If it was only in your genes—" he broke off suddenly, and leaned toward Donal. "Listen to me," he almost whispered. "I'm a coward."
"Are you sure?" said Donal, levelly. "How do you know?"
"I'm frightened sick," whispered ArDell. "Sick-frightened of the universe. What do you know about the mathematics of social dynamics?"
"It's a predicative system of mathematics, isn't it?" said Donal. "My education didn't lie in that direction."
"No, no!" said ArDell, almost fretfully. "I'm talking about the statistics of social analysis, and their extrapolation along lines of population increase and development." He lowered his voice even further. "They approach a parallel with the statistics of random chance!"
"I'm sorry," said Donal. "That means nothing to me."
ArDell gripped Donal's arm suddenly with one surprisingly strong hand.
"Don't you understand?" he murmured. "Random chance provides for every possibility—including dissolution. It must come, because the chance is there.
As our social statistics grow into larger figures, we, too, entertain the possibility. In the end, it must come. We must destroy ourselves. There is no other alternative. And all because the universe is too big a suit of clothes for us to wear. It gives us room to grow too much, too fast. We will reach a statistically critical mass—and then," he snapped his fingers, "the end!"
"Well, that's a problem for the future," said Donal. But then, because he could not help reacting to the way the other man was feeling, he added, more gently, "Why does it bother you, so much?"
"Why, don't you see?" said ArDell. "If it's all to go—just like that—as if it never has been, then what was the use of it all? What's to show for our existence? I don't mean things we built—they decay fast enough. Or knowledge. That's just a copying down from an open book into our own language. It has to be those things that the universe didn't have to begin with and that we brought to it. Things like love, and kindness—and courage."
"If that's the way you feel," said Donal, gently withdrawing his arm from the other's grasp, "why drink this way?"
"Because I am a coward," said ArDell. "I feel it out there, all the time, this enormousness that is the universe. Drinking helps me shut it out—that Godawful knowledge of what it can do to us. That's why I drink. To take the courage I need out of a bottle, to do the little things like passing through phase shift without medication."
"Why," said Donal, almost tempted to smile. "What good would that do?"
"It's facing it, in a little way," ArDell fixed him with his dark and pleading eyes. "It's saying, in one little instance—go ahead, rip me to the smallest shreds you can manage, spread me over your widest limits. I can take it."
Donal shook his head.
"You don't understand," said ArDell, sinking back in his float. "If I could work, I wouldn't need the alcohol. But I'm walled away from work nowadays. It's not that way with you. You've got your job to do; and you've got courage—the real kind. I thought maybe I could . . . well, never mind. Courage wouldn't be transferable, anyway."
"Are you going to Harmony?" asked Donal.
"Whither my Prince goes, there go I," said ArDell, and snorted his laugh again. "You should read my contract, sometime." He turned back to the bar. "Another whiskey?"
"No," said Donal, standing up. "If you'll excuse me—"
"I'll see you again," muttered ArDell, keying for another drink. "I'll be seeing you."
"Yes," said Donal. "Until then."
"Until then," ArDell lifted his newly filled glass from the bar. The chime sounded again overhead, and the voice reminded them that only seventy-odd minutes remained before shift-time. Donal went out.
Half an hour later, after he had gone back to his own room for one more careful rereading and study of
Anea's contract, Donal pressed the button on the door of the stateroom of William, Prince and Chairman of the Board, on Ceta. He waited.
"Yes?" said the voice of William, over his head.
"Donal Graeme, sir," said Donal. "If you aren't busy—"
"Oh, of course—Donal. Come in!" The door swung open before him and Donal entered.
William was sitting on a plain float before a small deskboard holding a pile of papers and a tiny portable secretary. A single light glowed directly above him and the deskboard, silvering his gray hair. Donal hesitated, hearing the door click to behind him.
"Find a seat somewhere," said William, without looking up from his papers. His fingers flickered over the keys of the secretary. "I have some things to do."
Donal turned about in the gloom outside the pool of light, found an armchair float and sat down in it. William continued for some minutes, scanning through his papers, and making notes on the secretary.
After a while he shoved the remaining papers aside and the deskboard, released, drifted with its burden to over against a farther wall. The single overhead light faded and a general illumination flooded the cabin.
Donal blinked at the sudden light. William smiled.
"And now," he said, "what's the nature of your business with me?"
Donal blinked, stared, and blinked again.
"Sir?" he said.
"I think we can avoid wasting time by ignoring pretenses," said William, still in his pleasant voice. "You pushed yourself on us at the table because you wanted to meet someone there. It was hardly the marshal—your Dorsai manners could have found a better way than that. It was certainly not Hugh, and most unlikely to be ArDell. That leaves Anea; and she's pretty enough, and you're both young enough to do something that foolish . . . but, I think not, under the conditions." William folded his lean fin-gers together, and smiled. "That leaves me."
"Sir, I—" Donal started to stand up, with the stiffness of outraged dignity.
"No, no," said William, gesturing him back. "Now it'd be foolish to leave, after going to all this trouble to get here, wouldn't it?" His voice sharpened. "Sit down!"
Donal sat.
"Why did you want to see me?" asked William.
Donal squared his shoulders.
"All right," he said. "If you want me to put it bluntly ... I think I might be useful to you."
"By which," said William, "you think you might be useful to yourself, by tapping the till, as it were, of my position and authority—go on."
"It so happened," said Donal, "that I came into possession of something belonging to you."
William extended his hand, without a word. After a second's hesitation, Donal extracted Anea's contract from his pocket and passed it over. William took it, unfolded it, and glanced over it. He laid it carelessly down on a little table beside him.
"She wanted me to get rid of it for her," said Donal. "She wanted to hire me to dispose of it for her. Evidently she didn't know how hard it is to destroy a sheet of the material contracts are made on."
"But you took the job," said William.
"I made no promises," said Donal, painfully.
"But from the start, you intended to bring it straight to me."
"I believe," said Donal, "it's your property."
"Oh, of course," said William. He smiled at Donal for a long moment. "You realize, of course," he said, finally, "that I needn't believe a word of what you've said. I only need to assume that you stole it yourself and later got cold feet about disposing of it—and dreamed up this cock-and-bull story in a attempt to sell it back to me. The-captain of this ship would be glad to put you under arrest at my word and hold you for trial as soon as we reach Harmony."
A slight, cold, galvanic shiver ran down Donal's spine.
"A Select of Kultis won't lie under oath," he said. "She—"
"I see no reason to involve Anea in this," said William. "It could be all handled very conveniently without her. My statement against yours."
Donal said nothing. William smiled again.
"You see," said William, "the point I'm laboring to bring home to you. You happen not only to be venal, but a fool."
"Sir!" the word shot from Donal's lips. William waved a disinterested hand.
"Save your Dorsai rages for someone who'll be
49m impressed by them. I know as well as you do, you've no intention of attacking me. Possibly, if you were a different sort of Dorsai—but you're not. You are as I say, both venal and a fool. Accept these statements for the obvious facts they are; and we can get down to business."
He looked at Donal. Donal said nothing.
"Very well, then," went on William. "You came to me, hoping I could find you of some use. As it happens, I can. Anea is, of course, just a foolish young girl—but for her benefit, as well as my own, being her employer, we'll have to see she doesn't get into serious trouble. Now, she had confided in you once. She may again. If she does so—by no means discourage her. And to keep you available for such confidences," William smiled again, quite good*humoredly, this time, "I believe I can find you a commission as Force-Leader, under Commandant Hugh Kiliien, when we touch down on Harmony. There is no reason why a military career shouldn't go hand in hand with whatever other uses I can find for you."
"Thank you, sir," said Donal.
"Not at all—" A chime sounded over some hidden wall speaker. "Ab—phase shift in five minutes." William picked up a small silver box from a table near his feet, and sprung it open. "Have you taken your medication, yet? Help yourself."
He extended to Donal.
"Thank you, sir," said Donal carefully. "I have."
"Then," said William, helping himself to a white tablet, and replacing the box. "I believe that is all."
"I believe so, sir," said Donal.
Donal inclined his head and went out. Stopping outside the stateroom door only long enough to take one of his own phase shift sedatives, he headed back toward his own stateroom. On the way, he stopped by the ship's library to check out an information spool on the First Dissident Church, of Harmony; and this delayed him sufficiently so that he was passing down one of the long sectional corridors when the phase shift occurred.
He had been prudently asleep during those previous shifts he had gone through while outbound from Dorsai; and, of course, he had learned years ago what to expect. In addition, he was fully medicated; and the shift itself was over before it was really begun. In fact, it took place in no time, in no conceivable interval at all. Yet it had happened; and some inextinguishable recognizing part of him knew and remembered that he had been torn apart, down to the most fractional elements of his being, and spread to the wide universe and caught and collected and reassembled at some arbitrary point light-years from his destruction. And it was this memory, not the shift itself, that made him falter, for one short step, before he took up again his steady march back to his stateroom. And the memory would stay with him.
He continued on down the corridor; but he was far from having run his gauntlet for the day. As he reached the end of one section, Anea stepped out from the cross-bar corridor there that was the exact duplicate of the one, several sections down, where he first met her. Her green eyes were afire.
"You've been seeing him!" she snapped, barring his way.
"Seeing ... oh, William," he said.
"Don't deny it."
"Why should I?" Donal looked at her almost with wonder. "Surely, it's nothing to make a secret about?"
She stared at him.
"Oh!" she cried. "You just don't care for anything, do you? What did you do ... about what I gave you?"
"I gave it back to its owner, of course," said Donal. "There was no other sensible thing I could do."
She turned suddenly so white that he almost reached out to catch her, certain she was about to faint. But she did no such womanish thing. Her eyes, as she stared at him, were shocked to enormity.
"Oh!" she breathed. "You . . . you traitor. You cheat*" and before he could make a move or say a word to stop her, she had whirled about and was running off down the corridor back in the direction from which she had come.
With a certain wry unhappiness—for, in spite of his rather low opinion of her common sense, he had really expected her to listen to his explanation—he took up his solitary walk to his stateroom. He traveled the rest of the way without meeting anyone. The corridors, in the aftermath of the phase shift were deserted by prudent passengers.
Only, passing a certain stateroom, he heard sounds of sickness from within; and, looking up, recognized the number on its door as one he had looked up just now on his recent trip to the library.
It was the stateroom of ArDell Montor; and that would be the man himself inside it now, unraedicated and racked by the passing of the phase shift, fighting his own long battle with the universe.
FORCE-LEADER
"All right, gentlemen," said Hugh Killien.
He stood, confident and impressive in his chameleon battle-dress, with the fingertips of his right hand resting on the gently domed surface of the mapviewer before him.
"If you'll gather around the viewer, here—" he said. The five Force-Leaders moved in until all six men stood thickly clustered around the meter-square area of the viewer. The illumination from the blackout shell enclosing them beat down and met the internal upward illumination of the viewer, so that Donal, glancing around at his fellow-officers, was irresistibly reminded of men caught between wrath and wrath, in some small package section of that hell their First Dissident Church Liaison-Elder had been so eloquent about, only a few hours since at the before-battle service.
"... Our position is here," Hugh was saying. "As your commandant I make you the customary assurance that it is a perfectly tenable position and that the contemplated advance in no way violates the Mercenaries Code. Now—" he went on more briskly, "as you can see, we occupy an area five kilometers in front and three kilometers in depth, between these two ridges. Second Command of Battle Unit 176 to our right, Fourth Command of Battles to our left.
"The contemplated action calls for the Second and Fourth Commands to hold fast in full strength on both our flanks, while we move forward at sixty per cent of strength and capture a small town called Faith Will Succour, which is here—"
His index finger stabbed down and rested upon the domed image of the map.
"... At approximately four kilometers of distance from our present position. We will use three of our five Forces, Skuak's, White's and Graeme's; and each Force will make its separate way to the objective. You will each have your individual maps. There are woods for the first twelve hundred meters. After that, you will have to cross the river, which is about forty meters in width, but which Intelligence assures us is fordable at the present time with a maximum depth of a hundred and twenty centimeters. On the other side it will be woods again, thinning out gradually right up to the edge of the town. We leave in twenty minutes. It'll be dawn in an hour and I want all three Forces across that river before full daylight. Any questions?"
"What about enemy activity in the area?" asked Skuak. He was a short, stocky Cassidan, who looked Mongoloid, but was actually Eskimo in ancestry. "What kind of opposition can we expect?"
"Intelligence says nothing but patrols. Possibly a small Force holding the town, itself. Nothing more." Hugh looked around the circle of faces. 'This should be bread and butter. Any more questions?"
"Yes," said Donal. He had been studying the map. "What sort of military incompetent decided to send us at only sixty per cent of strength?"
The atmosphere in the shell froze suddenly and sharply. Donal looked up to find Hugh Killien's eyes on his across the viewer,
"As it happened," said the commandant, a slight edge to his words, "it was my suggestion to Staff, Graeme. Perhaps you've forgotten—I'm sure none of the other Force-Leaders have—but this is a demonstration campaign to show the First Dissident Church we're worthy of our hire."
"That hardly includes gambling the lives of four hundred and fifty men," retorted Donal, unmoved.
"Graeme," said Hugh, "you're junior officer here; and I'm commandant. You ought to know I don't have to explain tactics to you. But just to set your mind at rest, Intelligence has given a clear green on enemy activity in the area."
"Still," persisted Donal, "why take unnecessary chances?"
Hugh sighed in exasperation.
"I certainly shouldn't have to give you lessons in stategy," he said bitingly. "I think you abuse the right the code gives you to question Staff decisions. But to put an end to this—there's a good reason why we'll be using the minimum number of men. Our main thrust at the enemy is to come through this area. If we moved forward in strength, the United Orthodox forces would immediately begin to strengthen defenses. But doing it this way, it should appear we're merely moving to take up a natural vacuum along the front. Once we have the town tied down, the Second and Fourth Commands can filter in to reinforce us and we are in position to mount a full-scale attack at the plains below. Does that answer you?"
"Only partially," said Donal. "I—"
"Give me patience!" snapped the Freilander. "I have five campaigns to my credit, Force-Leader. I'd hardly stick my own neck in a noose. But I'll be taking over White's Force and leaving him in command back here in the Area. You, I and Skuak will make the assay. Now, are you" satisfied?"
There was, of course, no reply to be made to that. Donal bowed his Head in submission and the meeting broke up. Walking back to his Force area, however, alongside Skuak, Donal remained unreconstructed enough to put an extra question to the Cassidan.
"Do you think I'm starting at shadows?" asked Donal.
"Huh!" grunted Skuak. "It's his responsibility. He ought to know what he's doing." And, on that note, they parted; each to marshal his own men.
Back in his own Force area, Donal found that his Groupmen had already assembled his command. They stood under arms, drawn up in three hues of fifty men each, with a senior and junior Groupman at the head of each line. The ranking senior Groupman, a tall, thin Cetan veteran named Morphy, accompanied him as he made his rounds of the ranks, inspecting the men.
They were a good unit, Donal thought, as he paced down between the rows. Well-trained men, battle-seasoned, although in no sense elite troops, since they had been picked at random by the Elders of the First Dissident Church—William having stipulated only his choice of officers for the demonstration Battle Unit. Each man carried a handgun and knife in addition to his regular armament; but they were infantry, spring-rifle men. Weapon for weapon, any thug in the back alley of a large city had more, and more modern firepower; but the trick with modern warfare was not to outgun the enemy, but carry weapons he could not gimmick. Chemical and radiation armament was too easily put out of action from a distance. Therefore, the spring-rifle with its five thousand-sliver magazine and its tiny, compact, non-metaUic mechanism which could put a sliver in a man-sized target at a thousand meters time after time with unvarying accuracy.
Yet, thought Donal, pacing between the silent men in the faint darkness of pre-dawn, even the spring-rifle would be gimmickable one of these days. Eventually, the infantryman would be back to the knife and short sword. And the emphasis would weigh yet again more heavily on the skill of the individual soldier. For sooner or later, no matter what fantastic long-range weapons you mounted, the ground itself had to be taken—and for that there had never been anything but the man in the ranks.
Donal finished his inspection and went back to stand in front of them.
"Rest, men," he said. "But hold your ranks. All Groupmen over here with me."
He walked off out of earshot of the men in ranks and the Groupmen followed him. They squatted in a circle and he passed on to them the orders of the Staff he had just received from Hugh, handing out maps to each of them.
"Any questions?" he asked, as Hugh had asked his Force-Leaders.
There were none. They waited for him to go on. He, in turn looked slowly around the circle, assessing these men on whom his command would depend.
He had had a chance to get to know them in the three weeks previous to this early morning. The six who faced him represented, in miniature, the varying reactions his appointment as Force-Leader had produced in the Force as a whole. Of the hundred and fifty men under him, a few were doubtful of him because of his youth and lack of battle experience. A larger number were unequivocably glad to have him over them because of the Dorsai reputation. A few, a very few, were of that class of men who bristle automatically, as man to man, whenever they find themselves in contact with another individual who is touted as better than they. The instinctive giant- killers. Of this type was the Senior Groupman of the Third Group, an ex-Coby miner named Lee. Even squatting now in this circle, on the brink of action, he met Donal's eye with a faint air of challenge, his brush of dark hair stiffly upright in the gloom, his bony jaw set. Such men were troublemakers unless they had responsibility to hold them down. Donal revised his original intention to travel, himself, with the Third Group.
"We'll split up into patrol-sized units of twenty-five men each," he said. "There'll be a Senior or Junior Groupman to each unit. You'll move separately as units, and if you encounter an enemy patrol, you'll fight as a unit. I don't want any unit going to the rescue of another. Is that clear?"
They nodded. It was clear.
"Morphy," said Donal, turning to the thin Senior Groupman. "I want you to go with the Junior unit of Lee's Group, which will have the rearguard position. Lee will take his own half-group directly in front of you. Chassen"—he looked at the Senior Groupman of the Second Group—"you and Zolta will take positions third and fourth from the rear. I want you personally in fourth position. Suki, as Junior of the First Group, you'll be ahead of Chassen and right behind me. I'll take the upper half of the First Group in advance position."
"Force," said Lee. "How about communications?"
"Hand-signal. Voice. And that's all. And I don't want any of you closing up to make communication easier. Twenty-meter miminum interval between units." Donal looked around the circle again. "Our job here is to penetrate to me little town as quickly and quietly as we can. Fight only if you're forced into it; and break away as quickly as you can."
"The word is it's supposed to be a Sunday walk," commented Lee.
"I don't operate by back-camp rumor," said Donal flatly, his eyes seeking out the ex-miner. "We'll take all precautions. You Groupmen will be responsible for seeing that your men are fully equipped with everything, including medication."
Lee yawned. It was not a gesture of insolence— not quite.
"All right," said Donal. "Back to your Groups."
The meeting broke up.
A few minutes later the almost inaudible peep of a whistle was carried from Force to Force; and they began to move out. Dawn was not yet in the sky, but the low overcast above the treetops was beginning to tighten at their backs.
The first twelve hundred meters through the woods, though they covered it cautiously enough, turned out to be just what Lee had called it—a Sunday walk. It was when Donal, in the lead with the first half-Group, came out on the edge of the river that things began to tighten up.
"Scouts out!" he said. Two of the men from the Group sloshed into the smoothly flowing water, and, rifles held high, waded across its gray expanse to the far side. The glint of their rifles, waved in a circle, signaled the all clear and Donal led the rest of the men into the water and across.
Arrived on the far side, he threw out scouts in three directions—ahead, and along the bank each way—and waited until Suki and his men appeared on the far side of the river. Then, his scouts having returned with no sight of the enemy, Donal spread his men out in light skirmish order and went forward.
The day was growing rapidly. They proceeded by fifty meter jumps, sending the scouts out ahead, then moving the rest of the men up when the signal came back that the ground was clear ahead. Jump succeeded jump and there was no contact with the enemy. A little over an hour later, with the large orange disk of E. Eridani standing clear of the horizon, Donal looked out through a screen of bushes at a small, battle-torn village that was silent as the grave.
Forty minutes later, the three Forces of the Third Command, Battle Unit 176 were united and dug in about the small town of Faith Will Succour. They had uncovered no local inhabitants.
They had had no encounter with the enemy.
FORCE-LEADER II
The mime of Force-Leader Graeme was mud.
The Third Command, or at least that portion of it that was dug in around the village, made no great attempt to hide the fact from him. If he had shown at all mat he was sensitive to their opinion of him, they would have made even less. But there was something about his complete indifference to their attitude that put a check to their obvious contempt. Nevertheless, the hundred and fifty men that had been forced by him to make their approach on the village under full equipment and maximum security effort, and the three hundred other men who had made a much more casual and easy approach, and were congratulating themselves on being out from under such an officer, agreed in an opinion of Donal that had reached its nadir! There is only one thing that veterans hate
63B worse than being made to sweat unnecessarily in garrison; and that is being made to sweat unnecessarily in the field. The word had gone out that the day's work was to be a Sunday walk. And it had been a Sunday walk, except for those serving under a green young Dorsai officer, name of Graeme. The men were not happy.
Along about twilight, as the sunset was fading through the bushy-limbed trees that were the local mutant variform of the Earthly conifer that had been imported when this planet was terraformed, a runner came from Hugh at Command HQ, just outside the enemy end of the village. He found Donal seated astride a fallen log, studying a map of the local area.
"Signal from Battles," said the runner, squatting beside the log.
"Stand up," said Donal, quietly. The runner stood. "Now, what's the signal?"
"Second and Third Commands won't be moving up until tomorrow morning," said the runner, sulkily.
"Signal acknowledged," said Donal, waving him off. The runner turned and hurried away with another instance of the new officer's wax-and-braid to relate to the other enlisted men back at HQ.
Left to himself, Donal continued to study the map as long as the light lasted. When it was completely gone, he put the map away, produced a small black whistle from his pocket and peeped for his ranking Senior Groupman.
A moment later a thin body loomed up against the faintly discernible sky beyond the treetops.
"Morphy, sir. Reporting," came a voice of the Senior Groupman.
"Yes—" said Donal. "Sentries all posted, Groupman?"
"Yes, sir." The quality of Morphy's tone was completely without inflection.
"Good. I want them alert at all times. Now, Morphy—"
"Yes, sir?"
"Who do we have in the Force that has a good sense of smell?"
"Smell, sir?"
Donal merely waited.
"Well, sir," said Morphy, finally and slowly. "There's Lee, he practically grew up in the mines, where you have to have a good sense of smell. That's the mines on Coby, Force-Leader."
"I assumed those were the mines you meant," said Donal, dryly. "Get Lee over here, will you?"
Morphy took out his own whistle and blew for the Senior Groupman, Third Group. They waited.
"He's about the camp isn't he?" said Donal, after a moment. "I want all the men within whistle sound that aren't on sentry duty."
"Yes, sir," said Morphy. "He'll be here in a moment. He knows it's me. Everybody sounds a little different on these whistles and you get to know them like voices after a while, sir."
"Groupman," said Donal. "I'd be obliged if you didn't feel the need to keep telling me things I already know."
"Yes, sir," said Morphy, subsiding.
Another shadow loomed up out of the darkness.
"What is it, Morphy?" said the voice of Lee.
"I wanted to see you," spoke up Donal, before the Senior Groupman had a chance to answer. "Morphy tells me you have a good sense of smell."
"I do pretty well," said Lee.
"Sir!"
"I do pretty well, sir."
"AH right," said Donal. "Both of you take a look at the map here. Look sharp. I'm going to make a light," He flicked on a little flash, shielded by his hand. The map was revealed, spread out on the log before them. "Look here," said Donal, pointing. "Three kilometers off this way. Do you know what that is?"
"Small valley," said Morphy. "It's way outside our sentry posts."
"We're going there," Donal said. The light went out and he got up from the log.
"Us? Us, sir?" the voice of Lee came at him.
"The three of us," said Donal. "Come along." And he led the way surefootedly out into the darkness.
Going through the woods, he was pleased to discover the two Groupmen were almost as sure-footed in the blackness as himself. They went slowly but carefully for something over a mile; and then they felt the ground beginning to slope upward under their feet. "All right. Down and easy," said Donal quietly. The three men dropped to their bellies and began in skilled silence to work their way up to the crest of the slope. It took them a good half-hour; but at the end of that time they lay side by side just under the skyline of a ridge, looking over into a well of blackness that was a small, hidden valley below. Donal tapped Lee on the shoulder and when the other turned his face toward him in the gloom, Donal touched his own nose, pointed down into the valley and made sniffing motions. Lee turned his face back to the valley and lay in that position for several minutes, apparently doing nothing at all. However, at the end of that time, he turned toward Donal again, and nodded. Donal motioned them all back down the slope.
Donal asked no questions and the two Groupmen volunteered nothing until they were once more back safely within the lines of their own sentry posts. Then Donal turned toward Lee.
"Well, Groupman," he said. "What did you smell?"
Lee hesitated. His voice, when he answered, had a note of puzzlement in it.
"I don't know, sir," he answered. "Something— sour, sort of. I could just barely smell it."
"That's the best you can do?" inquired Donal. "Something sour?"
"I don't know, sir," said Lee. "I've got a pretty good nose, Force—in fact," a note of belligerence crept into his voice. "I've got a damned good nose. I never smelled anything like this before. I'd remember."
"Have either of you men ever contracted on this planet before?"
"No," said Lee.
"No, sir," answered Morphy.
"I see," said Donal. They had reached the same log from which they had started a little less than three hours before. "Well, that'll be all. Thank you, Groupmen."
He sat down on the log again. The other two hesitated a moment; and then went off together.
Left alone, Donal consulted the map again; and sat thinking for a while. Then he rose, and hunting up Morphy, told him to take over the Force, and stay awake. Donal himself was going to Command HQ. Then he took off.
Command HQ was a blackout shell containing a sleepy orderly, a map viewer and Skuak.
"The commandant around?" asked Donal, as he came in.
"Been asleep three hours," said Skuak. "What're you doing up? I wouldn't be if I didn't have the duty."
"Where's he sleeping?"
"About ten meters off in the bush, at eleven o'clock," said Skuak. "What's it all about? You aren't going to wake him, are you?'
"Maybe he'll still be awake," said Donal; and went out.
Outside the shell, and the little cleared space of the HQ area, he cat-footed around to the location Skuak had mentioned. A battle hammock was there, slung between two trees, with a form mounding its climate cover. But when Donal reached in to put his hand on the form's shoulder, it closed only on the soft material of a rolled-up battle jacket.
Donal breathed out and turned about. He went back the way he had come, past the Command HQ area, and was stopped by a sentry as he approached the village.
"Sorry, Force," said the sentry. "Commandant's order. No one to go into the village area. Not even himself, he says. Booby traps."
"Oh, yes—thank you, sentry," said Donal; and, turning about, went off into the darkness.
As soon as he was safely out of sight, however, he turned again, and worked his way back past the sentry lines and in among the houses of the village. The small but very bright moon which the Harmonites called The Eye of the Lord was just rising, and throwing, through the ruined walls, alternate patches of tricky silver and black. Slipping in and out of the black places, he began patiently to search the place, house by house, and building by building.
It was a slow and arduous process, carried out the way he was doing it, in complete silence. And the moon mounted in the sky. It was nearly four hours later that he came upon what he was searching for.
In the moonlit center of a small building's roofless shell stood Hugh Killien, looking very tall and efficient in his chameleon battle-dress. And close to him— almost close enough to be in his arms—was Anea, the Select of Kultis. Beyond them both, blurred by action of the polarizer that had undoubtedly been the means of allowing it to carry her invisibly to this spot, was a small flying platform.
"... Sweet," Hugh was saying, his resonant voice pitched so low it barely carried to the ears of Donal, shrouded in shadow outside the broken wall, "Sweet, you must trust me. Together we can stop him; but you must let me handle it. His power is tremendous—"
"I know, I know!" she interrupted, fiercely, all but wringing her hands. "But every day we wait makes it more dangerous for you, Hugh. Poor Hugh—" gently she raised her hand to touch his cheek, "what I've dragged you into."
"Dragged? Me?" Hugh laughed, low and confidently. "I went into this with my eyes open." He reached out for her. "For you—"
But she slipped away from him.
"Now's not the time for that," she said. "Anyway, it's not me you're doing this for. It's Kultis. He's not going to use me," she said fiercely, "to get my world under his thumb!"
"Of course, it's for Kultis," said Hugh. "But you are Kultis, Anea. You're everything I love about the Exotics. But don't you see; all we have to work on are your suspicions. You think he's planning against the Bond, against Sayona, himself. But that's not enough for us to go to Kultis with."
"But what can I do?" she cried. "I can't use his own methods against him. I can't lie, or cheat, or set agents on him while he still holds my contract. I ... I just can't. That's what being Select means!" She clenched her fists. "I'm trapped by my own mind, my own body." She turned on him suddenly. "You said when I first spoke to you, two months ago you said you had evidence!"
"I was mistaken," Hugh's tone was soothing. "Something came to my attention—at any rate I was wrong. I have my own built-in moral system, too, Anea. It may not reach the level of psychological blockage like yours," he drew himself up, looking very martial in the moonlight. "But I know what's honorable and right."
"Oh, I know. I know, Hugh—" she was all contrition, "But I get so desperate. You don't know—"
"If he had only made some move against you personally—"
"Me?" She stiffened. "He wouldn't dare! A Select of Kultis—and besides," she added with more of a touch of common sense than Donal had heretofore given her credit for possessing, "that'd be foolish. He'd have nothing to gain; and Kultis would be alerted against him."
"I don't know," Hugh scowled in the moonlight. "He's a man like anyone else. If I thought—"
"Oh, Hugh!" she giggled suddenly, like any schoolgirl. "Don't be absolutely ridiculous!"
"Ridiculous!" His tone rang with wounded feelings.
"Oh, now—I didn't mean that. Hugh, now stop looking like an elephant that just had his trunk stung by a bee. There's no point in making things up. He's far too intelligent to—" she giggled again, then sobered. "No, it's his head we have to worry about; not his heart."
"Do you worry about my heart?" he asked in a low voice.
She looked down at the ground.
"Hugh—I do like you," she said. "But you don't understand. A Select is a ... a symbol."
"If you mean you can't—"
"No, no, not that—" she looked up quickly. "I've no block against love, Hugh. But if I was involved in something ... something small, and mean, it's what it would do to those back on Kultis to whom a Select means something—You do understand?"
"I understand that I'm a soldier," he said. "And that I never know whether I'll have a tomorrow or not."
"I know," she said. "And they send you out on things like this, dangerous things."
"My dear little Anea," he said, tenderly. "How little you understand what it is to be a soldier. I volunteered for this job."
"Volunteered?" She stared at him.
"To go look for danger—to go look for opportunities to prove myself!" he said, fiercely. "To make myself a name, so that the stars will believe I'm the kind of man a Select of Kultis could want and belong with!"
"Oh, Hugh!" she cried on a note of enthusiasm. "If you only could! If only something would make you famous. Then we could really fight him!"
He checked, staring at her in the moonlight with such a sandbagged expression that Donal, in the shadows, nearly chuckled.
"Must you always be talking about politics?" he cried.
But Donal had already turned away from the two of them. There was no point in listening further. He moved silently out of earshot; but after that he went quickly, not caring about noise. His search for Hugh had taken him clear across the village, so that what was closest to him now was his own Force area. The short night of Harmony's northern continent was already beginning to gray toward dawn. He headed toward his own men, one of his odd certainties chilling him.
"Halt!" cried one of his own sentries, as Donal broke clear of the houses. "Halt and give—sir!"
"Come with me!" snapped Donal. "Where's the Third Group Area from here?"
"This way, sir," said the man; and led the way, trotting to keep up with Donal's long strides.
They burst into the Third Group area. Donal put his whistle to his lips and blew for Lee.
"What—?" mumbled a sleepy voice from half a dozen meters' distance. A hammock heaved and disgorged the bony figure of the ex-miner. "What the hell ... sir?"
Donal strode up to him and with both hands swung him about so that he faced toward the enemy territory from which me dawn breeze was coming. "Smell!" he ordered.
Lee blinked, scrubbed his nose with one knotty fist, and stifled a yawn. He took a couple of deep breaths filling his lungs, his nostrils spread—and suddenly he snapped into complete awakedness.
"Same thing, sir," he said, turning to Donal. "Stronger."
"All right!" Donal wheeled about on the sentry. "Take a signal to Senior Groupmen, First and Second Groups. Get their men into trees, high up in trees, and get themselves up, too."
'Trees, sir?"
"Get going! I want every man in this Force a dozen meters off the ground in ten minutes—with their weapons!" The sentry turned to make off. "If you've got time after making that signal, try to get through to Command HQ with it. If you see you can't, climb a tree yourself. Got that?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then get going!"
Donal wheeled about and started himself on the business of getting the sleeping Third Group soldiers out of their hammocks and up the trunks of tall trees. It was not done in ten minutes. It was closer to twenty by the time they were all off the ground. A group of Dorsai schoolboys would have made it in a quarter of the time, from the sounder sleep of youth. But on the whole, thought Donal, pulling himself at last up into a tree, they had been in time; and that was what counted.
He did not stop as the others had, at a height of a dozen meters. Automatically, as he hurried the others out of their hammocks, he had marked the tallest tree in the area; and this he continued to climb until he had a view out over the tops of the lesser vegetation of the area. He shaded his eyes against the new-rising sun, peering off toward enemy territory, and between the trees.
"Now, what d'we do?" floated up an aggrieved voice from below and off to one side of his own lofty perch. Donal took his palm from his eyes and tilted his head downward.
"Senior Groupman Lee," he said in a low, but carrying voice. "You will shoot the next man who opens his mouth without being spoken to first by either you, or myself. That is a direct order."
He raised his head again, amid a new silence, and again peered off under his palm through the trees.
The secret of observation is patience. He saw nothing, but he continued to sit, looking at nothing in particular, and everything in general; and after four slow minutes he was rewarded by a slight flicker of movement that registered on his gaze. He made no effort to search it out again, but continued to observe in the same general area; and gradually, as if they were figures developing on a film out of some tangled background, he became aware of men slipping from cover to cover, a host of men, approaching the camp.
He leaned down again through the branches.
"No firing until I blow my whistle," he said, in an even lower voice than before. "Pass the word— quietly."
He heard, like the murmur of wind in those same branches, the order being relayed on to the last man in the Third Group and—he hoped—to the Second and First Groups as well.
The small, chameleon-clad figures continued to advance. Squinting at them through the occulting leaves and limbs, he made out a small black cross sewn to the right shoulder of each battle-dress. These were no mercenaries. These were native elite troops of the United Orthodox Church itself, superb soldiers and wild fanatics both. And even as the recognition confirmed itself in his mind, the advancing men broke into a charge upon the camp, bursting forth all at once in the red-gray dawnlight into full-throated yips and howls, underlaid a second later by the high-pitched singing of their spring-gun slivers as they ripped air and wood and flesh.
They were not yet among the trees where Donal's force was hiding. But his men were mercenaries, and had friends in the camp the Orthodox elite were attacking. He held them as long as he could, and a couple of seconds longer; and then, putting his whistle to lips, he blew with the damper completely off—a blast that echoed from one end of the camp to the other.
Savagely, his own men opened up from the trees. And for several moments wild confusion reigned on the ground. It is not easy to tell all at once from which direction a sliver gun is being fired at you. For perhaps five minutes, the attacking Orthodox soldiers labored under the delusion that the guns cutting them down were concealed in some groundlevel ambush. They killed ruthlessly, everything they could see on their own eye-level; and, by the time they had discovered their mistake, it was too late. On their dwin- died numbers was concentrated the fire of a hundred and fifty-one rifles; and if the marksmanship of only one of these was up to Dorsai standards, that of the rest was adequate to the task. In less than forty minutes from the moment in which Donal had begun to harry his sleep-drugged men up into the trees, the combat was over.
The Third Group slid down out of their trees and one of the first down—a soldier named Kennedy— calmly lifted his rifle to his shoulder and sent a sliver through the throat of an Orthodox that was writhing on the ground, nearby.
"None of that!" cried Donal, sharply and clearly; and his voice carried out over the sea. A mercenary hates wanton killing, it not being his business to slaughter men, but to win battles. But not another shot was fired. The fact said something about a significant change in the attitude of the men of the Third Command toward a certain new officer by the name of Graeme.
Under Donal's orders, the wounded on both sides were collected and those with serious wounds medicated. The attacking soldiery had been wiped out almost to a man. But it had not been completely one-sided. Of the three hundred-odd men who had been on the ground at the time of the attack, all but forty-three—and that included Force-Leader Skuak— were casualties.
"Prepare to retreat," ordered Donal—and, at that
A moment, the man facing him turned his head to look past at something behind Donal. Donal turned about.
Pounding out of the ruined village, hand gun in his fist, was Commandant Killien.
In silence, not moving, the surviving soldiers of the Command watched him race up to him. He checked at their stare; and his eyes swung about to focus on Donal. He dropped to a walk and strode up to within a few meters of the younger officer.
"Well, Force-Leader!" he snapped. "What happened? Report?"
Donal did not answer him directly. He raised his hand and pointed to Hugh; and spoke to two of the enlisted men standing by.
"Soldiers," he said. "Arrest that man. And hold him for immediate trial under Article Four of the Mercenaries Code."
VETERAN
Directly after getting into the city, with his canceled contract stiff in his pocket, and cleaning up in his hotel room, Donal went down two flights to pay his visit to Marshal Hendrik Gait. He found him in, and concluded certain business with him before leaving to pay his second call at a different hotel across the city.
In spite of himself, he felt a certain weakness in the knees as he announced his presence to the doorbot. It was a weakness most men would have excused him. William, Prince of Ceta, was someone few persons would have cared to beard in his own den; and Donal, in spite of what he had just experienced, was still a young—a very young—man. However, the doorbot invited him in, and summoning up his calmest expression, Donal strode into the suite.
William was, as the last time Donal had seen him, busy at his desk. This was no affectation on William's part, as a good many people between the stars could testify. Seldom has one individual accomplished in a single day what William accomplished in the way of business, daily, as a matter of routine. Donal walked up to the desk and nodded his greeting. William looked up at him. "I'm amazed to see you," he said. "Are you, sir?" said Donal. William considered him in silence for perhaps half a minute.
"It's not often I make mistakes," he said. "Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that when I do they turn out to be on the same order of magnitude as my successes. What inhuman kind of armor are you wearing, young man, that leads you to trust yourself in my presence, again?"
"Possibly the armor of public opinion," replied Donal. "I've been in the public eye, recently. I have something of a name, nowadays."
"Yes," said William. "I know that type of armor from personal experience, myself."
"And then," said Donal, "you did send for me." "Yes." And then, without warning, William's face underwent a change to an expression of such savagery as Donal had never seen before. "How dare you!" snarled the older man, viciously. "How dare you!"
"Sir," said Donal, wooden-faced, "I had no alternative."
"No alternative! You come to me and have the effrontery to say—no alternative?"
"Yes, sir," said Donal.
William rose in swift and lithe motion. He stalked around the desk to stand face to face, his eyes up-tilted a Httle to bore into the eyes of this tall young Dorsai.
"I took you on to follow my orders, nothing else!" he said icily. "And you—grandstand hero that you are—wreck everything."
"Sir?"
"Yes—'sir'. You backwoods moron! You imbecile. Who told you to interfere with Hugh Killien? Who told you to take any action about him?"
"Sir," said Donal. "I had no choice."
"No choice? How—no choice?"
"My command was a command of mercenaries," answered Donal, without moving a muscle. "Commandant Killien had given his assurance in accordance with the Mercenaries Code. Not only had his assurance proved false, he himself had neglected his command while in the field and in enemy territory. Indirectly, he had been responsible for the death of over half his men. As ranking field officer present, I had no choice but to arrest him and hold him for trial."
"A trial held on the spot?"
"It is the code, sir," said Donal. He paused. "I regret it was necessary to shoot him. The court-martial left me no alternative."
"Again!" said William. "No alternative! Graeme, the space between the stars does not go to men who can find no alternatives]" He turned about abruptly, walked back around his desk and sat down.
"All right," he said coldly but with all the passion gone, "get out of here." Donal turned and walked toward the door as William picked up a paper from before him. "Leave your address with my doorbot," said William. "I'll find some kind of a post for you on some other world."
"I regret, sir—" said Donal.
William looked up.
"It didn't occur to me that you would have any further need of me. Marshal Gait has already found me another post."
William continued to look at him for a long moment. His eyes were as cold as the eyes of a basilisk.
"I see," he said at last, slowly. "Well, Graeme, perhaps we shall have something to do with each other in the future."
"I'll hope we will," said Donal. He went out. But, even after he had closed the door behind him, he thought he could feel William's eyes still coming at him through all the thickness of its panel.
He had yet one more call to make, before his duty on this world was done. He checked the directory out in the corridor and went down a flight.
The doorbot invited him in; and ArDell Montor, as large and untidy as ever, with his eyes only slightly blurred from drink, met him halfway to the entrance. "You!" said ArDell, when Donal explained what it was he wanted. "She won't see you" He hunched his heavy shoulders, looking at Donal; and for a second his eyes cleared. Something sad and kind looked out of them, to be replaced with bitter humor. "But the old fox won't like it. I'll ask her."
'Tell her it's about something she needs to know," said Donal.
"I'll do that. Wait here," Ardell went out the door.
He returned in some fifteen minutes.
"You're to go up," he said. "Suite 1890." Donal turned toward the door. "I don't suppose," said the Newtonian, almost wistfully, "I'll be seeing you again."
"Why, we may meet," answered Donal.
"Yes," said ArDell. He stared at Donal penetratingly. "We may at that. We may at that."
Donal went out and up to Suite 1890. The doorbot let him in. Anea was waiting for him, slim and rigid in one of her high-collared, long dresses of blue.
"Well?" she said. Donal considered her almost sorrowfully.
"You really hate me, don't you?" he said.
"You killed him!" she blazed.
"Oh, of course." In spite of himself, the exasperation she was always so capable of tapping in him rose to the surface. "I had to—for your own good."
"For my good!"
He reached into his tunic pocket and withdrew a small telltale. But it was unlighted. For a wonder this apartment was unbugged. And then he thought—of course, I keep forgetting who she is.
"Listen to me," he said. "You've been beautifully /equipped by gene selection and training to be a
Select—but not to be anything else. Why can't you understand that interstellar intrigue isn't your dish?"
"Interstellar ... what're you talking about?" she demanded.
"Oh, climb down for a moment," he said wearily— and more youngly man he had said anything since leaving home. "William is your enemy. You understand that much; but you don't understand why or how, although you think you do. And neither do I," he confessed, "although I've got a notion. But the way for you to confound William isn't by playing his game. Play your own. Be the Select of Kultis. As the Select, you're untouchable."
"If," she said, "you've nothing more to say than that—"
"All right," he took a step toward her. "Listen, then. William was making an attempt to compromise you. Killien was his tool—"
"How dare you?" she erupted.
"How dare I?" he echoed wearily. "Is there anyone in this interstellar community of madmen and madwomen who doesn't know that phrase and use it to me on sight? I dare because it's the truth."
"Hugh," she stormed at him, "was a fine, honest man. A soldier and a gentleman! Not a ... a—"
"Mercenary?" he inquired. "But he was."
"He was a career officer," she replied haughtily. "There's a difference."
"No difference." He shook his head. "But you wouldn't understand that. Mercenary isn't necessarily the dirty word somebody taught you it is. Never mind. Hugh Killien was worse than any name you might be mistaken enough to call me. He was a fool."
"Oh!" she whirled about.
He took her by one elbow and turned her around. She came about in shocked surprise. Somehow, it had never occurred to her to imagine how strong he was. Now, the sudden realization of her physical helplessness in his hands shocked her into abrupt and unusual silence.
"Listen to the truth, then," he said. "William dangled you like an expensive prize before Killien's eyes. He fed him full of the foolish hope that he could have you—the Select of Kultis. He made it possible for you to visit Hugh that night at Faith Will Succour—yes," he said, at her gasp, "I know about that. I saw you there with him. He also made sure Hugh would meet you, just as he made sure that the Orthodox soldiers would attack."
"I don't believe it—" she managed.
"Don't you be a fool, too," Donal said, roughly. "How else do you think an overwhelming force of Orthodox elite troops happened to move in on the encampment at just the proper time? What other men than fanatic Orthodox soldiery could be counted on to make sure none of the men in our unit escaped alive? There was supposed to be only one man to escape from that affair—Hugh Killien, who would be in a position then to make a hero's claim on you. You see how much your good opinion is worth?"
"Hugh wouldn't—"
"Hugh didn't," interrupted Donal. "As I said, he was a fool, A fool but a good soldier. Nothing more was needed for William. He knew Hugh would be fool enough to go and meet you, and good soldier enough not to throw his life away when he saw his command was destroyed. As I say, he would have come back alone—and a hero."
"But you saw through this!" she snapped. "What's your secret? A pipeline to the Orthodox camp?"
"Surely it was obvious from the situation; a command exposed, a commandant foolishly making a love-tryst in a battleground, that something like the attack was inevitable. I simply asked myself what kind of troops would be used and how they might be detected. Orthodox troops eat nothing but native herbs, cooked in the native fashion. The odor of their cooking permeates their clothing. Any veteran of a Harmony campaign would be able to recognize their presence the same way."
"If his nose was sensitive enough. If he knew where to look for them—"
"There was only one logical spot—"
"Anyway," she said coldly. "This is beside the point. The point is"—suddenly she fired up before him—"Hugh wasn't guilty. You said it yourself. He was, even according to you, only a fool! And you had him murdered!"
He sighed in weariness.
"The crime," he said, "for which Commandant Killien was executed was that of misleading his men and abandoning them in enemy territory. It was that he paid with his life for."
"Murderer!" she said. "Get out!"
"But," he said, staring baffledly at her, "I've just explained."
"You've explained nothing," she said, coldly, and from a distance. "I've heard nothing but a mountain of lies, lies, about a man whose boots you aren't fit to clean. Now, will you get out, or do I have to call the hotel guard?"
"You don't believe—?" He stared at her, wide-eyed.
"Get out." She turned her back on him. Like a man in a daze, he turned himself and walked blindly to the door and numbly out into the corridor. Still walking, he shook his head, like a person who finds himself in a bad dream and unable to wake up.
What was this curse upon him? She had not been lying—she was not capable of doing so successfully. She had really heard his explanation and—it had meant nothing to her. It was all so obvious, so plain—the machinations of William, the stupidity of Killien. And she had not seen it when Donal pointed it out to her. She, of all people, a Select of Kultis!
Why? Why? Why?
Scourged by the devils of self-doubt and loneliness, Donal moved off down the corridor, back in the direction of Gait's hotel.
AIDE-DE-CAMP
They met in the office of Marshal Gait, in his Freiland home; and the enormous expanse of floor and the high vaulted ceiling dwarfed them as they stood three men around a bare desk.
"Captain Lludrow, this is my Aide, Commandant Donal Graeme," said Gait, brusquely. "Donal, this is Russ Lludrow, Patrol Chief of my Blue Patrol."
"Honored, sir," said Donal, inclining his head.
"Pleased to meet you, Graeme," answered Lludrow. He was a fairly short, compact man in his early forties, very dark of skin and eye.
"You'll trust Donal with all staff information," said Gait. "Now, what's your reconnaissance and intelligence picture?"
"There's no doubt about it, they're planning an expeditionary landing on Oriente." Lludrow turned to- ward the desk and pressed buttons on the map keyboard. The top of the desk cleared to transparency and they looked through at a non-scale map of the Sir-ian system. "Here we are," he said, stabbing his finger at roe world of Freiland, "here's New Earth"—his finger moved to Freiland's sister planet—"and here's Oriente"—his finger skipped to a smaller world inward toward me sun—"in the positions they'll be in, relative to one another twelve days from now. You see, we'll have the sun between the two of us and also almost between each of our worlds and Oriente. They couldn't have picked a more favorable tactical position."
Gait grunted, examining the map. Donal was watching Lludrow with quiet curiosity. The man's accent betrayed him for a New Earthman, but here he was high up on the Staff of Freiland's fighting forces. Of course, the two Sirian worlds were natural allies, being on the same side as Old Earth against the Venus-Newton-Cassida group; but simply because they were so close, there was a natural rivalry in some things, and a career officer from one of them usually did best on his home world.
"Don't like it," said Gait, finally. "It's a fool stunt from what I can see. The men they land will have to wear respirators; and what the devil do they expect to do with their beachhead when they establish it? Oriente's too close to the sun for terraforming, or we would have done it from here long ago."
"It's possible," said Lludrow, calmly, "they could intend to mount an offensive from there against our two planets here."
"No, no," Gait's voice was harsh and almost irritable. His heavy face loomed above the map. "That's as wild a notion as ierraforming Orients. They couldn't keep a base there supplied, let alone using it to attack two large planets with fully established population and industry. Besides, you don't conquer civilized worlds. That's a maxim."
"Maxims can become worn out, though," put in Donal.
"What?" demanded Gait, looking up. "Oh— Donal. Don't interrupt us now. From the looks of it," he went on to Lludrow, "it strikes me as nothing so much as a live exercise—you know what I mean."
Lludrow nodded—as did Donal unconsciously. Live exercises were something that no planetary Chief of Staff admitted to, but every military man recognized. They were actual small battles provoked with a handy enemy either for the purpose of putting a final edge on troops in training, or to keep that edge on troops that had been too long on a standby basis. Gait, almost alone among me Planetary Commanders of his time, was firmly set against mis action, not only in theory, but in practice. He believed it more honest to hire his troops out, as in the recent situation on Harmony, when they showed signs of going stale. Donal privately agreed with him; although mere was always the danger that when you hired troops out, they lost the sense of belonging to you, in particular, and were sometimes spoiled through mismanagement.
"What do you think?" Gait was asking his Patrol chief.
"I don't know, sir," Lludrow answered. "It seems the only sensible interpretation."
"The thing," interrupted Donal, again, "would be to go over some of the nonsensible interpretations as well, to see if one of them doesn't constitute a possible danger. And from that—"
"Donal," broke in Gait, dryly, "you are my aide, not my Battle Op."
"Still—" Donal was persisting, when the marshal cut him off in a tone of definite command.
"That will be all!"
"Yes, sir," said Donal, subsiding.
"Then," said Gait, turning back to Lludrow, "we'll regard this as a heaven-sent opportunity to cut an arm or two off the fighting strength of the Newton Cassidan fleet and field force. Go back to your Patrol. I'll send orders."
Lludrow inclined his head and was just about to turn and go when there was an interruption—the faint swish of air from one of the big office doors sliding back, and the tap of feminine heels approaching over the polished floor. They turned to see a tall, dazzlingly beautiful woman with red hair coming at them across the office.
"Elvine!" said Gait.
"Not interrupting anything, am I?" she called, even before she came up to them. "Didn't know you had a visitor."
"Russ," said Gait. "You know my sister-in-law's daughter, The Elvine Rhy? Elvine, this is my Blue Patrol Chief, Russ Lludrow."
"Very deeply honored," said Lludrow, bowing.
"Oh, we've met—or at least I've seen you before." She gave him her hand briefly, then turned to Donai. "Donal, come fishing with me."
"I'm sorry," said Donal. "I'm on duty."
"No, no," Gait waved him off with a large hand. "There's nothing more at the moment. Run along, if you want."
"At your service, then," said Donal.
"But what a cold acceptance!" she turned on Lludrow. "I'm sure the Patrol chief wouldn't have hesitated like that."
Lludrow bowed again.
"I'd never hesitate where the Rhy was concerned."
"There!" she said. "There's your model, Donal. You should practice manners—and speeches like that"
"If you suggest it," said Donal.
"Oh, Donal." She tossed her head. "You're hopeless. But come along, anyway." She turned and left; and he followed her.
They crossed the great central hall and emerged into the garden terrace above the blue-green bay of the shallow, inland sea that touched the edges of Gait's home. He expected her to continue down to the docks, but instead she whirled about in a small arbor, and stood facing him.
"Why do you treat me like this?" she threw at him. "Whyr
'Treat you?" He looked down at her.
"Oh, you wooden man!" Her lips skinned back over her perfect teeth. "What're you afraid of—that I'll eat you up?"
"Wouldn't you?" he asked her quite seriously— and she checked at his answer.
"Come on. Let's go fishing!" she cried, and whirled about and ran down toward the dock.
So, they went fishing. But even slicing through the water in pursuit of a twisting fish at sixty fathoms depth, Donal's mind was not on the sport. He let the small jet unit on his shoulders push him whither the chase led him; and, in the privacy of his helmet, condemned himself darkly for his own ignorance. For it was this crime of ignorance which he abhorred above all else—in this case his ignorance of the ways of women—that had led him to believe he could allow himself the luxury of a casual and friendly acquaintanceship with a woman who wanted him badly, but whom he, himself, did not want at all.
She had been living here, in this household, when Gait had brought him here as a personal aide. She was, by some intricate convolution of Freiland inheritance laws, the marshal's responsibility; in spite of the distance of their relationships and the fact that her own mother and some other relatives were still living. She was some five years older than Donal, although in her wild energy and violence of emotion, this difference was lost. He had found her excitements interesting, at first; and her company a balm to what—though he would not admit it to himself in so many words—was a recently bruised and very tender portion of his ego. That had been at first.
"You know," she had said to him in one of her peculiar flashes of directness. "Anybody would want me."
"Anybody would," he admitted, considering her beauty. It was not until later that he discovered, to his dismay, that he had accepted an invitation he had not even suspected was there.
For four months now, he had been established at the marshal's estate, learning some of the elements of Freilander Staff Control; and learning also, to his increasing dismay, some of the intricacies of a woman's mind. And, in addition to it all, he found himself puzzled as to why he did not want her. Certainly he liked Elvine Rhy. Her company was enjoyable, her attractiveness was undeniable, and a certain brightness and hunger in her personality matched similar traits in his own. Yet, he did not want her. No, not the least bit, not at all.
They gave up their fishing after several hours. Elvine had caught four, averaging a good seven or eight kilograms. He had caught none.
"Elvine—" he began, as he went up the steps of the .terrace with her. But, before he could finish his carefully thought out speech, an annunciator hidden in a rosebush chimed softly.
"Commandant," said the rosebush, gently, "the doorbot announces a Senior Groupman Tage Lee to see you. Do you wish to see him?"
"Lee—" murmured Donal. He raised his voice. "From Coby?"
"He says he is from Coby," answered the rosebush.
"I'll see him," said Donal, striding quickly toward the house. He heard the sound of running feet behind him and Elvine caught at his arm.
"Donal—" she said.
"This'll just take a minute," he answered. "I'll see you in the library in a few minutes."
"All right—" She let go and fell behind him. He went in and to the entrance hall.
Lee, the same Lee who had commanded his Third Group, was waiting for him.
"Well, Groupman," said Donal, shaking hands. "What brings you here?"
"You do, sir," said Lee. He looked Donal in the eye with something of the challenge Donal had marked the first time Donal had seen him. "Could you use a personal orderly?"
Donal considered him.
"Why?"
"I've been carrying my contract around since they let us all go after that business with Killien," said Lee. "If you want to know, I've been on a bat That's my cross. Out of uniform I'm an alcoholic. In uniform, it's better, but sooner or later I get into a hassle with somebody. I've been putting off signing up again because I .couldn't make up my mind what I wanted. Finally, it came to me. I wanted to work for you."
"You look sober enough now," said Donal.
"I can do anything for a few days—even stop drinking. If I'd come up here with the shakes, you'd never have taken me."
Donal nodded.
"I'm not expensive," said Lee. 'Take a look at my contract. If you can't afford me yourself, I'll sign up as a line soldier and you pull strings to get me as-
95B signed to you. I don't drink if I've got something to do; and I can make myself useful. Look here—"
He extended his hand in a friendly manner, as if to shake hands again, and suddenly there was a knife in it.
"That's a back-alley, hired killer trick," said Donal. "Do you think it'd work with me?"
"With you—no." Lee made the knife vanish again. "That's why I want to work for you. I'm a funny character, commandant. I need something to hang to. I need it the way ordinary people need food and drink and home and friends. It's all there in the psychological index number on my contract, if you want to copy it down and check on me."
"I'll take your word for it, for now," said Donal, "What is wrong with you?"
"I'm borderline psycho," Lee answered, his lean face expressionless. "Not correctable. I was born with a deficiency. What they tell me is, I've got no sense of right or wrong; and I can't manage just by abstract rules. The way the doctors put it when I first got my contract, I need my own, personal, living god in front of me all the time. You take me on and tell me to cut the throat of all the kids under five I meet, and that's fine. Tell me to cut my own throat—the same thing. Everything's all right, then."
"You don't make yourself sound very attractive."
"I'm telling you the truth. I can't tell you anything else. I'm like a bayonet that's been going around all my life looking for a rifle to fit on to; and now I've found it. So, don't trust me. Take me on probation for five years, ten years—the rest of my life. But don't shut me out." Lee half-turned and pointed one bony finger at the door behind him. "Out there is hell for me, commandant. Anything inside here is heaven."
"I don't know," said Donal, slowly. "I don't know that I'd want the responsibility."
"No responsibility." Lee's eyes were shining; and it struck home to Donal suddenly that the man was terrified: terrified of being refused. "Just tell me. Try me, now. Tell me to get down and bark like a dog. TeU me to cut my left hand off at the wrist. As soon as they've grown me a new one I'll be back to do whatever you want me to do." The knife was suddenly back in his hand. "Want to see?'
"Put that away!" snapped Donal. The knife disappeared. "All right, I'll buy your contract personally. My suit of rooms are third door to the right, the head of the stairs. Go up there and wait for me."
Lee nodded. He offered no word of thanks. He only turned and went.
Donal shook himself mentally as if the emotional charge that had crackled in the air about him the last few seconds was a thing of physical mass draped heavily upon his shoulders. He turned and went to the library.
Elvine was standing looking out the great expanse of open wall at the ocean, as he came in. She turned quickly, at the sound of his steps and came to meet him.
"What was it?" she asked.
"One of my soldiers from the Harmony business," he said. "I've taken him on as my personal orderly." He looked down at her. "Ev—"
Instantly, she drew a little away from him. She looked out the wall, one hand tailing down to play with a silver half-statuette that sat on a low table beside her.
"Yes?" she said.
He found it very hard to get the words out.
"Ev, you know I've been around here a long time," he said.
"A long time?" At that, she turned to face him with a slight look of startlement. "Four months? It seems like hours, only."
"Perhaps," he said, doggedly. "But it has been a long time. So perhaps it's just as well I'm leaving."
"Leaving?" Her eyes shot wide; hazel eyes, staring at him. "Who said you were leaving?"
"I have to, of course," he said. "But I thought I ought to clear something up before I go. I've liked you a great deal, Ev—"
But she was too quick for him.
"Liked me?" she cried. "I should think you should! Why, I haven't hardly had a minute to myself for entertaining you. I swear I hardly know what it looks like any more outside of this place! Liked me! You certainly ought to like me after the way I've put myself out for you!"
He gazed at her furious features for a long moment and then he smiled ruefully.
"You're quite right," he said Tve put you to a great deal of trouble. Pardon me for being so dense as not to notice it" He bent his head to her. 'Til be going now."
He turned and walked away. But he had hardly taken a dozen steps across the sunlit library before she called his name.
"Donal!"
He turned and saw her staring after him, her face stiff, her fists clenched at her side.
"Donal, you ... you can't go," she said, tightly.
"I beg your pardon?" He stared at her.
"You can't go," she repeated. "Your duty is here. You're assigned here."
"No." He shook his head. "You don't understand, Ev. This business of Oriente's come up. Fm going to ask the marshal to assign me to one of the ships."
"You can't." Her voice was brittle. "He isn't here. He's gone down to the Spaceyard."
"Well, then, I'll go there and ask him."
"You can't. I've already asked him to leave you here. He promised."
"You whatT The words exploded from his lips in a tone more suited to the field man to this quiet mansion.
"I asked him to leave you here."
He turned and stalked away from her.
"Donal!" He heard her voice crying despairingly after him, but there was nothing she, or anyone in that house could have done, to stop him then.
He found Gait examining the new experimental model of a two-man anti-personnel craft. The older man looked up in surprise as Donal came up.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Could I see you alone for a minute, sir?" said Donal. "A private and urgent matter."
Gait shot him a keen glance, but motioned aside with his head and they stepped over into the privacy of a tool control boom.
"What is it?" asked Gait.
"Sir," said Donal. "I understand Elvine asked you if I couldn't continue to be assigned to your household during the upcoming business we talked about with Patrol Chief Lludrow earlier today."
"That's right. She did."
"I did not know of it," said Donal, meeting the older man's eyes. "It was not my wish."
"Not your wish?"
"No, sir."
"Oh," said Gait. He drew a long breath and rubbed his chin with one thick hand. Turning his head aside, he gazed out through the screen of the control booth at the experimental ship. "I see," he said. "I didn't realize."
"No reason why you should," Donal felt a sudden twist of emotion inside him at the expression on the older man's face. "I should have spoken to you before sir."
"No, no," Gait brushed the matter aside with a wave of his hand. 'The responsibility's mine. I've never had children. No experience. She has to get herself settled in life one of these days; and ... well, I have a high opinion of you, Donal."
"You've been too kind to me already, sir," Donal said miserably.
"No, no ... well, mistakes will happen. I'll see you have a place with the combat forces right away, of course."
"Thank you," said Donal.
"Don't thank me, boy." Abruptly, Gait looked old. "I should have remembered. You're a Dorsai."
STAFF LIAISON
"Welcome aboard," said a pleasant-faced Junior Captain, as Donal strode through the gas barrier of the inner lock. The Junior Captain was in his early twenties, a black-haired, square-faced young man who looked as if he had gone in much for athletics. "I'm J.C. Allmin Clay Andresen."
"Donal Graeme." They saluted each other. Then they shook hands.
"Had any ship experience?" asked Andresen.
"Eighteen months of summer training cruises in the Dorsai," answered Donal. "Command and armament—no technical posts."
"Command and armament," said Andresen, "are plenty good enough on a Class 4J ship. Particularly Command. You'll be senior officer after me—if anything happens." He made the little ritual gesture, reaching out to touch a close, white, carbon-plastic wall beside him. "Not that I'm suggesting you take over in such a case. My First can handle things all right. But you may be able to give him a hand, if it should happen."
"Be honored," said Donal, "Care to look over the ship?" "I'm looking forward to it." "Right. Step into the lounge, then." Andresen led the way across the small reception room, and through a sliding bulkhead to a corridor that curved off ahead of them to right and left. They went through another door in the wail of the corridor directly in front of them, down a small passage, and emerged through a final door into a large, pleasantly decorated, circular room.
"Lounge," said Andresen. "Control center's right under our feet; reversed gravity." He pressed a stud on the wall and a section of the floor slid back. "You'll have to flip," he warned, and did a head-first dive into the hole.
Donal, who knew what to expect, followed the J.C.'s example. The momentum of his dive shot him through and into another circular chamber of the same size as the lounge, in which everything would have been upside down and nailed to the ceiling, except for the small fact that here the gravity was reversed; and what had been down, was up, and up was down instead.
"Here," said Andresen, as Donal landed lightly on the floor at one side of the opening, "is our Control Eye. As you probably saw when you were moving in to come aboard, the Class 4J is a ball-and-hammer ship." He pressed several studs and in the large globe floating in the center of the floor, that which he had referred to as the Control Eye, a view formed of their craft, as seen from some little distance outside the ship. Half-framed against the star-pricked backdrop of space, and with just a sliver of the curved edge of Freiland showing at the edge of the scene, she floated. A sphere thirty meters in diameter, connected by two slim shafts a hundred meters each in length to a rhomboid-shape that was the ship's thrust unit, some five meters in diameter at its thickest and looking like a large child's spinning top, pivoted on two wires mat clamped it at the middle. This was the "hammer." The ship, proper, was the "ball."
"No phase-shift equipment?" asked Donal. He was thinking of the traditional cylinder shape of the big ships that moved between the stars.
"Don't fool yourself," answered Andresen. "The grid's there. We just hope the enemy doesn't see it, or doesn't hit it. We can't protect it, so we try to make it invisible." His finger stabbed out to indicate the apparently bare shafts. "There's a covering grid running the full length of the ship, from thrust to nose. Painted black."
Donal nodded thoughtfully.
'Too bad a polarizer won't work in the absence of atmosphere," he said.
"You can say that," agreed Andresen. He flicked off the Eye. "Let's look around the rest of the ship by hand."
He led out a door and down a passage similar to the one by which they had entered the lounge. They came out into a corridor that was the duplicate of the curving one they had passed in the other half of the ship.
"Crew's quarters, mess hall, on the other one," explained Andresen. "Officer's quarters, storage and suppliers, repair section, on this one." He pushed open a door in the corridor wall opposite them and they stepped into a section roughly the size of a small hotel room, bounded on its farther side by the curving outer shell of the ship, proper. The shell in this section was, at the moment, on transparent; and the complicated "dentist's chair" facing the bank of controls at the foot of the transparency was occupied; although the figure in it was dressed in coveralls only.
"My First," said Andresen. The figure looked up over the headrest of the chair. It was a woman in her early forties.
"Hi, All," she said. "Just checking the override." Andresen made a wry grimace at Donal.
"Antipersonnel weapons," he explained. "Nobody likes to shoot the poor helpless characters out of the sky as they fall in for an assault—so it's an officer's job. I usually take it over myself if I'm not tied up with something else at the moment. Staff Liaison Donal Graeme—First Officer Coa Benn."
Donal and she shook hands.
"Well, shall we get on?" asked Andresen. They toured the rest of the ship and ended up before the door of Donal's stateroom in Officer's Country.
"Sorry," said Andresen. "But we're short of bunk space. Full complement under battle conditions. So we had to put your orderly in with you. If you've no objection—"
"Not at all," said Donal.
"Good," Andresen looked relieved. "That's why I like the Dorsai. They're so sensible." He clapped Donal on the shoulder, and went hurriedly off back to his duties of getting his ship and crew ready for action.
Entering his stateroom, Donal found Lee had already set up both their gear, including a harness hammock for himself to supplement the single bunk that would be Donal's.
"All set?" asked Donal.
"All set," answered Lee. He still chronically forgot the "sir"; but Donal, having already had some experience with the fanatic literal-mindedness with which the man carried out any command given him, had refrained from making an issue of it. "You settle my contract, yet?"
"I haven't had time," said Donal. "It can't be done in a day. You knew that, didn't you?"
"No," said Lee. "All I ever did was hand it over. And then, later on when I was through my term of service they gave it back to me; and the money I had coming."
"Well, it usually takes a number of weeks or months," Donal said. He explained what it had never occurred to him that anyone should fail to know, that the contracts are owned entirely by the individual's home community or world, and that a contract agreement was a matter for settlement between the employer and the employee's home government. The object was not to provide the individual so much with a job and a living wage, as to provide the home government with favorable monetary and "contractual" balances which would enable them to hire, in their turn, the trained specialists they needed. In the case of Lee's contract, since Donal was a private employer and had money to offer, but no contractual credits, the matter of Lee's employment had to be cleared with the Dorsai authorities, as well as the authorities on Coby, where Lee came from.
"That's more of a formality than anything else, though," Donal assured him. "I'm allowed an orderly, since I've been commandant rank. And the intent to hire's been registered. That means your home government won't draft you for any special service some place else."
Lee nodded, which was almost his utmost expression of relief.
"... Signal!" chimed the annunciator in the stateroom wall by the door, suddenly. "Signal for Staff Liaison Graeme. Report to Flagship, immediately. Staff Liaison Graeme report to Flagship immediately."
Donal cautioned Lee to keep from under the feet of the ship's regular crew; and left.
The Flagship of the Battle made up by the Red and Green Patrols of the Freilander Space Force was, like the Class 4J Donal had just left, already in temporary loose orbit around Oriente. It took him some forty minutes to reach her; and when he entered her lock reception room and gave his name and rank, he was assigned a guide who took him to a briefing room in the ship's interior.
The room was filled by some twenty-odd other Staff Liaisons.
They ranged in rank from Warrant Couriers to a Sub-Patrol Chief in his fifties. They were already seated facing a platform; and, as Donal entered—he was, apparently, the last to arrive—a Senior Captain of flag rank entered, followed closely by Blue Patrol Chief Lludrow.
"All right, gentlemen," said the Senior Captain; and the room came to order. "Here's the situation." He waved a hand and the wall behind him dissolved to reveal an artist's extrapolation of the coming bat-tie. Oriente floated in black space, surrounded by a number of ships in various patterns. The size of the ships had been grossly exaggerated in order to make them visible in comparison with the planet which was roughly two-thirds the diameter of Mars. The largest of these, the Patrol Class—long cylindrical interstellar warships—were in varying orbit eighty to five hundred kilometers above the planet's surface, so that the integration of their pattern enclosed Oriente in web of shifting movement. A cloud of smaller craft, C4Js, A (subclass) 9s, courier ships, firing platforms, and individual and two-man gnat class boats, held position out beyond and planetward of them, right down into the atmosphere.
"We think," said the Senior Captain, "that the enemy, at effective speed and already braking, will come into phase about here—" a cloud of assault ships winked into existence abruptly, a half million kilometers sunward of Oriente, and in the sun's eye. They fell rapidly toward the planet, swelling visibly in size. As they approached, they swung into a circular landing orbit about the planet. The smaller craft closed in, and the two fleets came together in a myriad of patterns whose individual motions the eye could not follow all at once. Then the attacking fleet emerged below the mass of the defenders, spewing a sudden cloud of tiny objects that were the assault troops. These drifted down, attacked by the smaller craft, while the majority of the assault ships from Newton and Cassida began to disappear like blown-out candles as they sought safety in a phase shift that would place them light-years from the scene of battle. To Donal's fine-trained professional mind it was both beautifully thrilling—and completely false. No battle since time began had ever gone off with such ballet grace and balance and none ever would. This was only an imaginative guess at how the battle would take place, and it had no place in it for the inevitable issuance of wrong orders, the individual hesitations, the underestimation of an opponent, the navigational errors that resulted in collisions, or firing upon a sister ship. These all remained for the actual event, like harpies roosting upon the yet-unblasted limbs of a tree, as dawn steals like some gray thief onto the field where men are going to fight. In the coming action off Oriente there would be good ac-
^ tions and bad, wise decisions, and stupid ones—and none of them would matter. Only their total at the end of the day.
"... Well, gentlemen," the Senior Captain was saying, "there you have it as Staff sees it. Your job— yours personally, as Staff Liaisons—is to observe. We want to know anything you can see, anything you can discover, anything you can, or think you can, deduce. And of course"—he hesitated, with a wry smile—"there's nothing we'd appreciate quite so much as a prisoner."
There was a ripple of general laughter at this, as all men there knew the fantastic odds against being able to scoop up a man from an already broken-open enemy ship under the velocities and other conditions of a space battle—and find him still alive, even if you succeeded.
"That's all," said the Senior Captain. The Staff Liaisons rose and began to crowd out the door.
"Just a minute, Graeme!"
Donal turned. The voice was the voice of Lludrow. The Patrol Chief had come down from the platform and was approaching him. Donal turned back to meet him.
"I'd like to speak to you for a moment," said Lludrow. "Wait until the others are out of the room." They stood together in silence until the last of the Staff Liaisons had left, and the Senior Captain had disappeared.
"Yes, sir?" said Donal.
"I'm interested in something you said—or maybe were about to say the other day—when I met you at Marshal Gait's in the process of assessing this Oriente business. You said something that seemed to imply doubt about the conclusions we came to. But I never did hear what it was you had in mind. Care to tell me now?"
"Why, nothing, sir," said Donal. "Staff and the marshal undoubtedly know what they're doing."
"It isn't possible, then, you saw something in the situation that we didn't?" Donal hesitated.
"No, sir. I don't know any more about enemy intentions and plans than the rest of you. Only—" Donal looked down into the dark face below his, wavering on the verge of speaking his mind. Since the affair with Anea he had been careful to keep his flights of mental perception to himself. "Possibly I'm just suspicious, sir."
"So are all of us, man!" said Lludrow, with a hint of impatience. "What about it? In our shoes what would you be doing?"
"In your shoes," said Donal, throwing discretion to the winds, "I'd attack Newton,"
Lludrow's jaw fell. He stared at Donal.
"By heaven," he said, after a moment. "You're not shy about expedients, are you? Don't you know a civilized world can't be conquered?'
Donal allowed himself the luxury of a small sigh. He made an effort to explain himself, once again, in terms others could understand.
"I remember the marshal saying that," he said. "I'm not so sanguine, myself. In fact, mat's a particular maxim I'd like to try to disprove some day.
However—that's not what I meant. I didn't mean to suggest we attempt to take Newton; but mat we attack it. I suspect the Newtonians are as maxim-ridden as ourselves. Seeing us try the impossible, they're very like to conclude we've suddenly discovered some way to make it possible. From their reactions to such a conclusion we might learn a lot—including about the Oriente affair."
Lludrow's look of amazement was tightening into a frown.
"Any force attacking Newton would suffer fantastic losses," he began.
"Only if they intended to carry the attack through," interrupted Donal, eagerly. "It could be a feint—nothing more man that. The point wouldn't be to do real damage, but to upset the thinking of the enemy strategy by introducing an unexpected factor."
"Still," said Lludrow, "to make their feint effective, the attacking force would have to run the risk of being wiped out."
"Give me a dozen ships—" Donal was beginning; when Lludrow started and blinked like a man waking up from a dream.
"Give you—" he said; and smiled. "No, no, commandant, we were speaking theoretically. Staff would never agree £o such a wild, unplanned gamble; and I've no authority to order it on my own. And if I did—how could I justify giving command of such a force to a young man with only field experience, who's never held command in a ship in his life?" He shook his head. "No, Graeme—but I will admit your idea's interesting. And I wish one of us at least had thought of it."
"Would it hurt to mention it—"
"It wouldn't do any good—to argue with a plan Staff has already had in operation for over a week, now." He was smiling broadly. "In fact, my reputation would find itself cut rather severely. But it was a good idea, Graeme. You've got the makings of a strategist. I'll mention the fact in my report to the marshal."
"Thank you, sir," said Donal.
"Back to your ship, then," said Lludrow.
"Good-by, sir."
Donal saluted and left. Behind him, Lludrow frowned for just a moment more over what had just been said—before he turned his mind to other things.
ACTING CAPTAIN
Space battles, mused Donal, are said to be held only by mutual consent. It was one of those maxims he distrusted; and which he had privately determined to disprove whenever he should get the chance. However—as he stood now by the screen of the Control Eye in the main control room of the C4J, watching the enemy ships appearing to swell with the speed of their approach—he was forced to admit that in this instance, it was true. Or true at least to the extent that mutual consent is involved when you attack an enemy point that you know that enemy will defend.
But what if he should not defend it after all? What if he should do the entirely unexpected—
"Contact in sixty seconds. Contact in sixty seconds!" announced the speaker over his head.
"Fasten all," said Andresen, calmly into the talker before him. He sat, with his First and Second Officers duplicating him on either side, in a "dentist's chair" across the room—"seeing" the situation not in actual images as Donal was doing, but from the readings of his instruments. And his knowledge was therefore the more complete one. Cumbersome in his survival battle suit, Donal climbed slowly into the similar chair that had been rigged for him before the Eye, and connected himself to the chair. In case the ship should be broken apart, he and it would remain together as long as possible. With luck, the two of them would be able to make it to a survival ship in orbit around Oriente in forty or fifty hours—if none of some dozens of factors intervened.
He had time to settle himself before the Eye before contact was made. In those last few seconds, he glanced around him; finding it a little wonderful in spite of all he knew, that this white and quiet room, undisturbed by the slightest tremor, should be perched on the brink of savage combat and its own quite possible destruction. Then mere was no more time for thinking. Contact with the enemy had been made and he had to keep his eyes on the scene.
Orders had been to harry the enemy, rather than close with him. Estimates had been twenty per cent casualties for the enemy, five per cent for the defending forces. But such figures, without meaning to be, are misleading. To the man in the battle, twenty per cent, or even five per cent casualties do not mean that he will be twenty per cent or five per cent wounded. Nor, in a space battle, does it mean that one man out of five, or one man out of twenty will be a casualty. It means one ship out of five, or one ship out of twenty—and every living soul aboard her; for, in space, one hundred per cent casualties mean ninety-eight per cent dead.
There were three lines of defense. The first were the light craft that were meant to slow down the oncoming ships so that the larger, more ponderous craft, could try to match velocities well enough to get to work with heavy weapons. Then there were the large craft themselves in their present orbits. Lastly, there were the second line of smaller craft that were essentially antipersonnel, as the attackers dropped their space-suited assault troops. Donal in a C4J was in the first line.
There was no warning. There was no full moment of battle. At the last second before contact, the gun crews of the C4J had opened fire. Then—
It was all over.
Donal blinked and opened his eyes, trying to remember what had happened. He was never to remember. The room in which he lay, fastened to his chair, had been split as if by a giant hatchet. Through the badly-lit gap, he could see a portion of an officer's stateroom. A red, self-contained flare was burning somewhere luridly overhead, a signal that the control room was without air. The Control Eye was slightly askew, but still operating. Through the transparency of his helmet, Donal could see the dwindling lights that marked the enemy's departure on toward Oriente. He struggled upright in his chair and turned his head toward the Control panel.
Two were quite dead. Whatever had split the room open had touched them, too. The Second officer was dead, Andresen was undeniably dead. Coa Benn still lived, but from the feeble movements she was making in the chair, she was badly hurt. And there was nothing anyone could do for her now that they were without air and all prisoners in their suits.
Donal's soldier-trained body began to react before his mind had quite caught up to it. He found himself breaking loose the fastenings that connected him to his chair. Unsteadily, he staggered across the room, pushed the lolling head of Andresen out of the way, and thumbed the intership button.
"C4J One-twenty-nine," he said. "C4J One-twenty-nine—" he continued to repeat the cabalistic numbers until the screen before him lit up with a hel-meted face as bloodless as that of the dead man in the chair underneath him.
"KL," said the face. "A-twenty-three?" Which was code for: "Can you still navigate?"
Donal looked over the panel. For a wonder, it had been touched by what had split the room—but barely. Its instruments were all reading.
"A-twenty-nine," he replied affirmatively.
"M-Forty," said the other, and signed off. Donal let the intership button slip from beneath his finger. M-Forty was—Proceed as ordered,
Proceed as ordered, for the C4J One-twenty-nine, the ship Donal was in, meant—get in close to Oriente and pick off as many assault troops as you can.
Donal set about the unhappy business of removing his dead and dying from their control chairs.
Coa, he noted, as he removed her, more gently than the others, seemed dazed and unknowing. There were no broken bones about her, but she appeared to have been pinched, or crushed on one side by just a touch of what had killed the others. Her suit was tight and intact. He thought she might make it, after all.
Seating himself in the captain's chair, he called the gun stations and other crew posts.
"Report," he ordered.
Gun stations One and Five through Eight answered.
"We're going in planetward," he said. "All able men abandon the weapon stations for now and form a working crew to seal ship and pump some air back in here. Those not sealed off, assemble in lounge. Senior surviving crewman to take charge."
There was a slight pause. Then a voice spoke back to him.
"Gun Maintenanceman Ordovya," it said. "I seem to be surviving Senior, sir. Is this the captain?"
"Staff Liaison Graeme, Acting Captain. Your officers are dead. As ranking man here, I've taken command. You have your orders, Maintenanceman."
"Yes, sir." The voice signed off.
Donal set himself about the task of remembering his ship training. He got the C4J underway toward Oriente and checked all instruments. After a while, the flare went out abruptly overhead and a slow, hissing noise registered on his eardrums—at first faintly, then scaling rapidly up in volume and tone to a shriek. His suit lost some of its drum-tightness.
A few moments later, a hand tapped him on his shoulder. He turned around to look at a blond-headed crewman with his helmet tilted back.
"Ship tight, sir," said the crewman. "I'm Ordovya."
Donal loosened his own helmet and flipped it back, inhaling the room air gratefully.
"See to the First Officer," he ordered. "Do we have anything in the way of a medic aboard?"
"No live medic, sir. We're too small to rate one. Freeze unit, though."
"Freeze her, then. And get the men back to their posts. We'll be on top of the action again in another twenty minutes."
Ordovya went off. Donal sat at his controls, taking the C4J in cautiously and with the greatest possible margins of safety. In principle, he knew how to operate the craft he was seated in; but no one knew better than he what a far cry he was from being an experienced pilot and captain. He could handle this craft the way someone who has taken half a dozen riding lessons can handle a horse—that is, he knew what to do, but he did none of it instinctively. Where Andresen had taken in the readings of all his instruments at a glance and reacted immediately, Donal concentrated on the half dozen main telltales and debated with himself before acting.
So it was that they came late to the action on the edges of Oriente's atmosphere; but not so late that the assault troops were already safely down out of range. Donal searched the panel for the override button on the antipersonnel guns and found it.
"Override on the spray guns," he announced into the mike before him. He looked at the instruments, but he saw in his imagination the dark and tumbling space suited bodies of the assault troops, and he thought of the several million tiny slivers of carbon steel that would go sleeting among them at the touch of his ringer. There was a slight pause before answering; and then the voice of Ordovya came back.
"Sir ... if you like, the gunmen say they're used to handling the weapons—"
"Maintenanceman!" snapped Donal. "You heard (he order. Override!"
"Override, sir."
Donal looked at his scope. The computer had his targets in the gunsights. He pressed the button, and held it down.
Two hours later, the C4J, then in standby orbit, was ordered to return to rendezvous and its captain to report to his Sub-Patrol chief. At the same time came a signal for all Staff Liaisons to report to the flagship; and one for Staff Liaison Donal Graeme to report personally to Blue Patrol Chief Lludrow. Considering the three commands, Donal called Ordovya on the ship's phone and directed him to take care of the first errand. He himself, he decided, could take care of the other two, which might—or might not—be connected.
Arriving at the flagship, he explained his situation to the Reception Officer, who made a signal both to the Staff Liaison people and to the Blue Patrol chief.
"You're to go directly to Lludrow," he informed Donal; and assigned him a guide.
Donal found Lludrow in a private office on the flagship that was not much bigger than Donal's stateroom in the C4J.
"Good!" said Lludrow, getting up behind a desk as Donal came in and coming briskly around it. He waited until the guide had left, and then he put a dark hand on Donal's arm.
"How'd your ship come through?" he asked.
"Navigating," said Donal. "There was a direct hit on the control room though. All officers casualties."
"All officers?" Lludrow peered sharply at him. "And you?"
"I took command, of course. There was nothing left, though, but antipersonnel mop-up."
"Doesn't matter," said Lludrow. "You were Acting Captain for part of the action?"
"Yes."
"Fine. That's better than I hoped for. Now," said Lludrow, "tell me something. Do you feel like sticking your neck out?"
"For any cause I can approve of, certainly," answered Donal. He considered the smaller, rather ugly man; and found himself suddenly liking the Blue Patrol chief. Directness like this had been a rare experience for him, since he had left the Dorsai.
"All right. If you agree, we'll both stick our necks out." Lludrow looked at the door of the office, but it was firmly closed. "I'm going to violate top security and enlist you in an action contrary to Staff orders, if you don't mind."
"Top security?" echoed Donal, feeling a sudden coolness at the back of his neck.
"Yes. We've discovered what was behind this Newton-Cassida landing on Oriente ... you know Oriente?"
"I've studied it, of course," said Donal. "At school—and recently when I signed with Freiland. Temperatures up to seventy-eight degrees centigrade, rock, desert, and a sort of native vine and cactus jungle. No large bodies of water worth mentioning and too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
"Right. Well," said Lludrow, "the important point is, it's big enough to hide in. They're down there now and we can't root them out in a hurry—and not at all unless we go down there after them. We thought they were making the landing as a live exercise and we could expect them to run the gauntlet back out in a few days or weeks. We were wrong."
"Wrong?"
"We've discovered their reason for making the landing on Oriente. It wasn't what we thought at all."
'That's fast work," said Donal. "What's it been ... four hours since the landing?"
"They made fast work of it," said Lludrow. "The news is being sat on; but they are firing bursts of a new kind of radiation from projectors that fire once, move, and fire again from some new hiding place—a large number of projectors. And the bursts they fire hit old Sinus himself. We're getting increased sun-" spot activity." He paused and looked keenly at Dona), as if waiting for comment. Donal took his time, considering the situation.
"Weather difficulties?" he said at last.
"That's it!" said Lludrow, energetically, as though Donal had been a star pupil who had just shone again. "Meteorological opinion says it can be serious, the way they're going about it. And we've already heard their price for calling it off. It seems there's a trade commission of theirs on New Earth right now. No official connection—but the Commission's got the word across."
Donal nodded. He was not at all surprised to hear that trade negotiations were going on in normal fashion between worlds who were at the same time actively fighting each other. That was the normal course of existence between the stars. The ebb and flow of trained personnel on a contractual basis was the lifeblood of civilization. A world who tried to go it on its own would be left behind within a matter of years, to wither on the vine—or at last buy the mere necessities of existence at ruinous cost to itself. Competition meant the trading of skilled minds, and that meant contracts, and contracts meant continuing negotiations.
"They want a reciprocal brokerage agreement," Lludrow said.
Donal looked at him sharply. The open market trading of contracts had been abandoned between the worlds for nearly fifty years. It amounted to speculating in human lives. It removed the last shreds of dignity and security from the individual and treated him as so much livestock or hardware to be traded for no
I other reason than the greatest possible gain. The Dorsai, along with the Exotics, Mara and Kultis, had led the fight against it. There was another angle as well. On "tight" worlds such as those of the Venus Group—which included Newton and Cassida—and the Friendlies, the open market became one more tool of the ruling group; while on "loose" worlds like Freiland, it became a spot of vulnerability where foreign credits could take advantage of local situations. "I see," said Donal.
"We've got three choices," Lludrow said. "Give in—accept the agreement. Suffer the weather effects over a period of months while we clean out Oriente by orthodox military means. Or pay a prohibitive price in casualties by a crash campaign to clean up Oriente in a hurry. We'd lose as many lives to the conditions down there as we would to the enemy in a crash campaign. So, it's my notion that it's a time to gamble—my notion, by the way, not Staff's. They don't know anything about this; and wouldn't stand for it if they did. Care to try your idea of throwing a scare into Newton, after all?"
"With pleasure!" said Donal, quickly, his eyes glowing.
"Save your enthusiasm until you hear what you're going to have to do it with," replied Lludrow, dryly. "Newton maintains a steady screen of ninety ships of the first class, in defensive orbit around it. I can give you five."
SUB-PATROL CHIEF
"Five!" said Donai He felt a small crawling sensa-tion down his spine. He had, before Lludrow turned him down the first time, worked out rather carefully what could be done with Newton and how a man might go about it. His plan had called for a lean and compact little fighting force of thirty first-class ships in a triangular organization of three sub-patrols, ten ships to each.
"You see," Lludrow was explaining, "it's not what craft I have available—even with what losses we've just suffered, my Blue Patrol counts over seventy ships of the first class, alone. It's what ships I can trust to you on a job where at least the officers and probably the men as well will realize that it's a mission that should be completely volunteer and that's being sneaked off when Staff's back is turned. The captains of these ships are all strongly loyal to me, personally, or I couldn't have picked them." He looked at Donal. "All right," he said. "I know it's impossible. Just agree with me and we can forget the matter."
"Can I count on obedience?" asked Donal.
"That," said Lludrow, "is the one thing I can guarantee you."
"I'll have to improvise," said Donal. "I'll go in with them, look at the situation, and see what can be done."
"Fair enough. It's decided then."
"It's decided," said Donal.
"Then come along." Lludrow turned and led him out of the office and through corridors to a lock. They passed through the lock to a small courier ship, empty and waiting for them there; and took it to a ship of the first class, some fifteen minutes off.
Ushered into the ship's large and complex main control room. Donal found five senior captains waiting for him. Lludrow accepted a salute from a gray-haired powerful-looking man, who by saluting revealed himself as captain of this particular ship.
"Captain Bannerman," said Lludrow, introducing him to Donal, "Captain Graeme." Donal concealed a start well. In the general process of his thinking, he had forgotten that a promotion for himself would be necessary. You could hardly put a Staff Liaison with a field rank of commandant over men captaining ships of the first class.
"Gentlemen," said Lludrow, turning to the other executive officers. "I've been forced to form your five ships rather hastily into a new Sub-Patrol unit. Captain
Graeme will be your new chief. You'll form a reconnaissance outfit to do certain work near the very center of the enemy space area; and I want to emphasize the point that Captain Graeme's command is absolute. You will obey any and all of his orders without question. Now, are there any questions any of you would like to ask before he assumes command?"
The five captains were silent.
"Fine, then." Lludrow led Donal down the line. "Captain Graeme, this is Captain Aseini."
"Honored," said Donal, shaking hands.
"Captain Sukaya-Mendez."
"At your service, captain."
"Captain El Man."
"Honored," said Donal. A scarred Dorsai face neanng forty looked at him. "I believe I know your family name, captain. High Island, isn't it?"
"Sir, near Bridgehead," answered El Man. "I've heard of the Graemes." Donal moved on.
"And Captain Ruoul." "Honored."
"Well, then," said Lludrow, stepping back briskly. "I'll leave the command in your hands, Captain Graeme. Anything in the way of special supplies?"
"Torpedoes, sir," answered Donal.
"I'll have Armaments Supply contact you," said Lludrow, And left.
Five hours later, with several hundred extra torpedoes loaded, the five-ship Sub-Patrol moved out for deep space. It was DonaTs wish that they get clear of the home base as soon as possible and off where the nature of their expedition could not be discovered and countermanded. With the torpedoes, Lee had come aboard; Donal having remembered that his orderly had been left aboard the C4J. Lee had come through the battle very well, being strapped in his hammock harness throughout in a section of the ship mat was undamaged by the hit that had pierced to the control room. Now, Donal had definite instructions for him.
"I want you with me, this time," he said. "You'll stay by me. I doubt very much I might need you; but if I do, I want you in sight."
"I'll be there," said Lee, unemotionally.
They had been talking in the Patrol chief's stateroom, which had been opened to Donal. Now, Donal headed for the main control room, Lee following behind. When Donal reached that nerve center of the ship, he found all three of the snip's officers engaged in calculating the phase shift, with Bannerman overseeing.
"Sir!" said Bannerman as Donal came up. Looking at him, Donal was reminded of his mathematics instructor at school; and he was suddenly and painfully reminded of his own youth.
"About ready to shift?" asked Donal.
"In about two minutes. Since you specified no particular conclusion point, the computer run was a short one. We've merely been making the usual checks to make sure mere's no danger of collision with any object. A four light-year jump, sir."
(4Good," said Donal. "Come here with me, Bannerman."
He led the way over to the larger and rather more elaborate Control Eye that occupied the center of this control room; and pressed keys. A scene from the library file of the ship filled the globe. It showed a green-white planet with two moons floating in space and lit by the illumination from a G2 type sun.
'The orange and the two pips," said Bannerman, revealing a moonless Freilander's dislikes for natural planetary satellites.
"Yes," said Donal. "Newton." He looked at Bannerman. "How close can we hit it?"
"Sir?" said Bannerman, looking around at him. Donal waited, holding his eyes steady on the older man. Bannerman's gaze shifted and dropped back to the scene in the Eye.
"We can come out as close as you want, sir," he answered. "See, in deep space jumps, we have to stop to make observations and establish our location precisely. But the precise location of any civilized planet's already established. To come out at a safe distance from their defenses, I'd say, sir—"
"I didn't ask you for a safe distance from their defenses," said Donal, quietly. "I said—how close?"
Bannerman looked up again. His face had not paled; but there was now a set quality about it. He looked at Donal for several seconds.
"How close?" he echoed. "Two planetary diameters."
"Thank you, captain," said Donal.
"Shift in ten seconds," announced the First Officer's voice; and began to count down. "Nine seconds— eight—seven—six—five—four—three—two—shiftl" They shifted.
"Yes," said Donal, as if the shift itself had never interrupted what he was about to say, "out here where it's nice and empty, we're going to set up a maneuver, and I want all the ships to practice it. If you'll call a captain's conference, captain."
Bannerman walked over to the control board and put in the call. Fifteen minutes later, with all junior officers dismissed, they gathered in the privacy of the control room of Bannerman's ship and Donal explained what he had in mind.
"In theory," he said, "our Patrol is just engaged in reconnaissance. In actuality, we're going to try to simulate an attacking force making an assault on the planet Newton."
He waited a minute to allow the weight of his words to register on their minds; and then went on to explain his intentions.
They were to set up a simulated planet on their ship's instruments. They would approach this planet, which was to represent Newton, according to a random pattern and from different directions, first a single ship, then two together, then a series of single ships—and so on. They would, theoretically, appear into phase just before the planet, fire one or more torpedoes, complete their run past the planet and immediately go out of phase again. The intention would be to simulate the laying of a pattern of explosions covering the general surface of the planet.
There was, however, to be one main difference. Their torpedoes were to be exploded well without the outer ring of Newton's orbits of defense, as if the torpedoes were merely intended as a means to release some radiation or material which was planned to fall in toward the planet, spreading as it went.
And, one other thing, the runs were to be so timed that the five-ship force, by rotation, could appear to be a large fleet engaged in continuous bombardment.
"... Any suggestions or comments?" asked Donal, winding it up. Beyond the group facing him, he could see Lee, lounging against the control room wall and watching the captains with a colorless gaze.
There was no immediate response; and then Ban-nerman spoke up slowly, as if he felt it had devolved upon him, the unwelcome duty of being spokesman for the group.
"Sir," he said, "what about the chances of collision?"
"They'll be high, I know," said Donal. "Especially with the defending ships. But we'll just have to take our chances."
"May I ask how many runs we'll be making?"
"As many," said Donal, "as we can." He looked deliberately around the group. "I want you gentlemen to understand. We're going to make every possible attempt to avoid open battle or accidental casualties. But these things may not be avoidable considering the necessarily high number of runs."
"How many runs did you have in mind, captain?" asked Sukaya-Mendez.
"I don't see," replied Donal, "how we can effectively present the illusion of a large fleet engaged in saturation bombardment of a world in under a full two hours of continuous runs."
'Two hours!" said Bannerman. There was an in- stmctive murmur from the group. "Sir," continued Bannerman. "Even at five minutes a run, that amounts with five ships to better than two runs an hour. If we double up, or if there's casualties it could run as high as four. That's eight phase shifts to an hour—sixteen in a two-hour period. Sir, even doped to the ears, the men on our ships can't take that."
"Do you know of anyone who ever tried, captain?" inquired Donal.
"No, sir—" began Bannerman.
"Then how do we know it can't be done?" Donal did not wait for an answer. "The point is, it must be done. You're being required only to navigate your ships and fire possibly two torpedoes. That doesn't require the manpower it would to fight your ships under ordinary conditions. If some of your men become unfit for duty, make shift with the ones you have left."
"Shai Dorsai!" murmured the scarred El Man; and Donal glanced toward him, as grateful for the support as for the compliment.
"Anyone want out?" Donal asked crisply.
There was a slow, but emphatic, mutter of negation from all of them.
"Right." Donal took a step back from them. "Then let's get about our practice runs. Dismissed, gentlemen."
He watched the four from other ships leave the control room.
"Better feed and rest the crews," Donal said, turning to Bannerman. "And get some rest yourself. I intend to. Have a couple of meals sent to my quarters."
"Sir," acknowledged Bannerman. Donal turned and left the control room, followed by Lee as by a shadow. The Cobyman was silent until they were in the stateroom; then he growled: "What did that scarface mean by calling you shy?"
"Shy?" Donal turned about in surprise.
"Shaey, shy—something like that."
"Oh," Donal smiled at the expression on the other's face. "That wasn't an insult, Lee. It was a pat on the back. Shai was what he said. It means something like—true, pure, the actual."
Lee grunted. Then he nodded.
"I guess you can figure on him," he said.
The food came, a tray for each of them. Donal ate lightly and stretched himself out on the couch. It seemed he dropped instantly into sleep; and when he awoke at the touch of Lee's hand on his shoulder he knew he had been dreaming—but of what, he could not remember. He remembered only a movement of shapes in obscurity, as of some complex physics problem resolving itself in terms of direction and mass, somehow given substance.
"Practice about to start," said Lee.
"Thank you, orderly," he said automatically. He got to his feet and headed toward the control room, shedding the druggedness of his sleep as he went. Lee had followed him, but he was not aware of this until the Cobyman pushed a couple of small white tablets into his hand.
"Medication," said Lee. Donal swallowed them automatically. Bannerman, over by the control board, had seen him come in, and now turned and came across the floor.
"Ready for the first practice run, sir," he said. "Where would you like to observe—controls, or Eye?"
Donal looked and saw they had a chair set up for him in both locations.
"Eye," he said. "Lee, you can take the other chair, as long as there does not seem to be one for you."
"Captain, you—"
"I know, Bannerman," said Donal, "I should have mentioned the fact I meant to have my orderly up here. I'm sorry."
"Not at all, sir." Bannerman went over and fitted himself into his own chair, followed by Lee. Donal turned his attention to the Eye.
The five ships were in line, in deep space, at thousand-kilometer intervals. He looked at their neat Indian file and stepped up the magnification slightly so that in spite of the distance that should have made even the nearest invisible, they appeared in detail, in-lighted by the Eye.
"Sir," said Bannerman; and his quiet voice carried easily across the room. "I've arranged a key-in. When we make our phase shift, that library tape will replace the image in the Eye, so you can see what our approach will actually look like."
"Thank you, captain."
"Phase shift in ten seconds—"
The count-down ticked off like the voice of a clock. Then, there was the sensation of a phase shift; and abruptly Donal was sweeping closely over a planet, barely fifty thousand kilometers distance from its surface. "Fire—" and "Fire—" spoke the speaker in the control room ceiling. Again, the indescribable destruction and rebuilding of the body. The world was gone and they were again in deep space.
Donal looked at the four other ships in line. Abruptly the leading one disappeared. The rest continued, seemingly, to hang there, without motion. There was no sound in the control room about him. The seconds crept by, became minutes. The minutes crawled. Suddenly—a ship appeared in front of Ban-nerman's craft.
Donal looked back at the three behind. Now, there were only two.
The run continued until all the ships had made their pass.
"Again," ordered Donal.
They did it again; and it went off without a hitch.
"Rest," said Donal, getting out of the chair. "Captain, pass the word for all ships to give their personnel a break of half an hour. Make sure everyone is fed, rested, and supplied with medication. Also supply every person with extra medication to be taken as needed. Then, I'd like to talk to you, personally."
When Bannerman had accomplished these orders and approached Donal, Donal took him aside.
"How about the reactions of the men?" he asked.
"Fine, captain," Bannerman said; and Donal was surprised to read a true enthusiasm in his voice, "We've got good crews, here. High level-ratings, and experience."
"I'm glad to hear it," said Donal, thankfully. "Now ... about the time interval—"
"Five minutes exactly, sir." Bannerman looked at him inquiringly. "We can shorten slightly, or lengthen as much as you want."
"No," said Donal. "I just wanted to know. Do you have battle dress for me and my orderly?"
"It's coming up from stores."
INTRODUCTION • from David Drake
I don't insist that you believe DORSAI! is the best novel of military SF ever written: one could make a pretty good case for Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS. I will, however, insist that those two-novels (first published within weeks of one another in 1959) are in combination the standard against which the subgenre of military SF must be judged.
Everybody who's attempted a complex task knows that mere are more ways to go wrong than there are to do the job right DORSAI! and STARSHIP TROOPERS are a useful illustration of the diversity nonetheless possible between first-class works, even within a category as narrow as military SF. Heinlein's novel focused on the individual soldier and the social forces that molded him. DORSAI! is an investigation of the problems of high command and the qualities that produce the ideal commander.
The differences in approach aren't so much apples and oranges but rather the drive and driven plates of a clutch: both command and execution are necessary for a military system to work. In my opinion, Dickson and Heinlein have explored these segments of the system not only as well as anybody in the field has done, but as well as anybody is likely ever to do.
DORSAI! is an exposition of what Basil Liddell-Hart termed the Strategy of Indirection. (I do not imply a necessarily direct connection.) Instead of overwhelming one's opponent by brute force, the exponent of indirection maneuvers so that his opponent has to attack or (better yet) is checkmated without a battle.
Liddell-Hart developed his theories as a reaction to the blood-drenched kilting grounds of World War (tee, a conflict that was as perfect an example of the brute force approach and its limitations as one could find. The brute force technique as refined to its quintessential form by Field Marshal Haig involved silencing hostile machine guns by attacking with more infantry than the machine gunners had bullets. (I wish I were exaggerating, but read the accounts.)
Liddell-Hart went further back in history and examined the campaigns of Hannibal, Sherman, and particularly the Byzantine general Belisarius to find an alternative strategy. To defeat an entrenched enemy, maneuver around him and force him to leave his fortifications in order to protect his rear areas. Instead of attacking an enemy, destroy his supplies so mat he has to retreat. Move into a position that the enemy must take (ideally for reasons of perceived honor rather than pragmatic need) and let him waste his strength against your fortifications—until you move out and leave him with a useless shell.
These are the sorts of campaigns that Donal Graeme, the hero of DORSAI!, fights. Anyone who has had the fortune to be involved in the other sort of war will wish that more real-life officers had considered the responsibilities of command as clearly as Dickson did.
DORSAI! is and was conceived as a self-standing novel. Because of the strength of its conception, however, it has become the foundation of one of science fiction's most ambitious and far-ranging constructs, the Childe Cycle. The Cycle is a vast structure, spanning a millennium from the historical 14th century to a fictional future in which the triune aspects of humanity will be united again in a form both superhuman and super-humane.
Much of the Cycle remains to be written still today, more than thirty years after the original publication of DORSAI!, but the pieces of the interlocking whole continue to appear—each excellent in its own right It is a tribute to the structure of the original novel that the conception shown here in microcosm remains valid despite the weight of detail accreting in the later novels.
I've discussed DORSAI! as paradigm: for fiction writers in general, for military professionals, and for viiB
Dickson himself in his later work. None of the above could have touched me when I first read the novel at age 15. (Well, I read THE GENETIC GENERAL; which is not quite the same thing, but almost.)
What struck me and caused me to reread the novel a number of times was mat this is one heck of a good story. It's a model of clean prose, seamless structure, and fast action, hi this too, DQRSAI! is a paradigm— for other writers. But that doesn't have to matter to readers, whether first-timers or (like me the other day) for the umpteenth time.
Dive in and have fun!
David Drake Chatham Country, NC viii
CADET
The boy was odd.
This much he knew for himself. This much he had heard his seniors—his mother, his father, his uncles, the officers at the Academy—mention to each other, nodding their heads confidentially, not once but many times during his short eighteen years of life, leading up to this day. Now, apart, wandering the empty rec fields in this long, amber twilight before returning to his home and the graduation supper awaiting him there, he admitted to the oddness— whether truly in himself, or only in what others thought of him.
"An odd boy," he had overheard the Commandant at the Academy saying once to the Mathematics Officer, "you never know which way he'll jump."
Back at home right now, the family would be wait- ing his return—unsure of which way he would jump. They would be half expecting him to refuse his Outgoing. Why? He had never given them any cause to doubt. He was Dorsai of the Dorsai, his mother a Kenwick, his father a Graeme, names so very old their origin was buried in the prehistory of the Mother Planet. His courage was unquestioned, his word unblemished. He had headed his class. His very blood and bones were the heritage of a long line of great professional soldiers. No blot of dishonor had ever marred that roll of warriors, no home had ever been burnt, its inhabitants scattered and hiding their family shame under new names, because of some failure on the part of one of the family's sons. And yet, they doubted.
He came to the fence that marked off the high hurdles from the jump pits, and leaned on it with both elbows, the tunic of a Senior Cadet pulled tight across his shoulders. In what way was he odd? he wondered into the wide glow of the sunset. How was he different?
He put himself apart from him in his mind's eye, and considered himself. A slim young man of eighteen years—tall, but not tall by Dorsai standards, strong, but not strong by Dorsai standards. His face was the face of his father, sharp and angular, straight-nosed; but without his father's massiveness of bones. His coloring was the dark coloring of the Dorsai, hair straight and black and a little coarse. Only his eyes— those indeterminate eyes that were no definite color but went from gray to green to blue with his shifting moods—were not to be found elsewhere on his fam- ily trees. But surely eyes alone could not account for a reputation of oddness?
There was, of course, his temper. He had inherited, in full measure, those cold, sudden, utterly murderous Dorsai rages which had made his people such that no sane man cared to cross one of them without good reason. But that was a common trait; and if the Dorsai thought of Donal Graeme as odd, it could not be for that alone.
Was it, he wondered now, gazing into the sunset, that even in his rages he was a little too calculating—a little too controlled and remote? And as he thought that thought, all his strangeness, all his oddness came on him with a rush, together with that weird sense of disembodiment that had afflicted him, now and again, ever since his birth.
It came always at moments like mis, riding the shoulders of fatigue and some great emotion. He remembered it as a very young boy in the Academy chapel at evening service, half-faint with hunger after the long day of hard military exercises and harder lesson. The sunset, as now, came slanting in through the high windows on the bare, highly polished walls and the solidographs of famous battles inset in them. He stood among the rows of his classmates between the hard, low benches, the ranked male voices, from the youngest cadet to the deep man-voices of the officers in the rear, riding the deep, solemn notes of the Recessional—that which was known as the Dorsai Hymn now, wherever man had gone, and which a man named Kipling had written the words of, over four centuries before.
. .. Far called, our navies melt away, On dune and headland sinks the fire. Lo! All our pomp of yesterday, Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre ...
As he had remembered it being sung at the burial service when his youngest uncle's ashes had been brought back from the slagged battlefield of Donneswort, on Freiland, third planet circling the star of Sirius.
... For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust, that builds on dust And guarding, calls not thee to guard . . .
And he had sung with the rest, feeling then, as now, the final words in the innermost recesses of his heart.
... For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
A chill shiver ran down his back. The enchantment was complete. Far and wide about him the red and dying light flooded the level land. In the farther sky the black dot of a hawk circled. But here by the fence and the high hurdles, he stood removed and detached, enclosed by some clear, transparent wall that set him apart from all the universe, alone, untouchable and enraptured. The inhabited worlds and their suns sank and dwindled in his mind's eye; and he felt the siren, deadly pull of that ocean of some great, hidden purpose that promised him at once fulfillment and a final dissolution. He stood on its brink and its waves lapped at his feet; and, as always, he strove to lift his foot and step forward into its depths and be lost forever; but some small part of him cried out against the self-destruction and held him back.
Then suddenly—as suddenly as it had come—the spell was broken. He turned toward the craft that would take him home.
As he came to the front entrance, he found his father waiting for him, in the half-shadow leaning with his wide shoulders spread above the slim metal shaft of his cane.
"Be welcome to this house," said his father and straightened up. "You'd better get out of that uniform and into some man's clothes. Dinner will be ready in half an hour."
MAN
The men of the household of Eachan Khan Graeme sat around the long, shimmering slab of the dining board in the long and shadowy room, at their drinking after the women and children had retired. They were not all present, nor—short of a minor miracle— was it ever likely that they would be, in this life. Of sixteen adult males, nine were off at the wars among the stars, one was undergoing reconstructive surgery at the hospital in Omalu, and the eldest, Donal's granduncle, Kamal, was quietly dying in his own room at the back of the household with an oxygen tube up his nose and the faint scent of the bay lilac to remind him of his Maran wife, now forty years dead. Sitting at the table were five—of which, since three o'clock this afternoon—Donal was one. Those others who were present to welcome him to bis adulthood were Eachan, his father; Mor, his elder brother, who was home on leave from the Friendlies; and his twin uncles lan and Kensie, who had been next in age above that James who had died at Donneswort. They sat grouped around the high end of the table, Eachan at its head, with his two sons on his right and his two younger twin brothers on his left.
"They had good officers when I was there," Eachan was saying. He leaned over to till Donal's glass, and Donal took it up automatically, listening with both ears.
"Freilanders all," said lan, the grimmer of the two dark twins. "They run to stiffness of organization without combat to shake them up. Kensie says Mara or Kultis, and I say why not?*'
"They have full companies of Dorsai there, I hear," said Mor, at Donal's right. The deep voice of Eachan answered from his left.
"They're show guards. I know of those. Why make a cake of nothing but icing? The Bond of Kultis likes to think of having an unmatched bodyguard; but they'd be fanned out to the troops fast enough in case of real trouble between the stars.1'
"And meanwhile," put in Kensie, with a sudden smile that split his dark face, "no action. Peacetime soldiering goes sour. The outfits split up into little cliques, the cake-fighters move in and an actual man—a Dorsai—becomes an ornament."
"Good," said Eachan, nodding. Donal swallowed absently from his glass and the unaccustomed whiskey burned fiercely at the back of his nose and throat.
Little pricklings of sweat popped out on his forehead; but he ignored them, concentrating on what was being said. This talk was all for his benefit, he knew. He was a man now, and could no longer be told what to do. The choice was his, about where he would go to take service, and they were helping him with what knowledge they had, of the eight systems and their ways.
"... I was never great for garrison duty myself," Eachan was continuing. "A mercenary's job is to train, maintain and fight; but when all's said and done, the fighting's the thing. Not that everyone's of my mind. There are Dorsal and Dorsal—and not all Dorsal are Graemes."
"The Friendlies, now—" said Mor, and stopped with a glance at his father, afraid that he had interrupted.
"Go on," said Eachan, nodding.
"I was just about to point out," said Mor, "there's plenty of action on Association—and Harmony, too, I hear. The sects will always be fighting against each other. And there's bodyguard work—"
"Catch us being personal gunmen," said lan, who— being closer in age to Mor man Mor's father—did not feel the need to be quite so polite, 'That's no job for a soldier."
"I didn't mean to suggest it," said Mor, turning to his uncle. "But the psalm-singers rate it high among themselves, and that takes some of their best talent. It leaves the field posts open for mercenaries,"
'True enough," said Kensie, equably. "And if they had less fanatics and more officers, those two worlds would be putting strong forces out between the stars. But a priest-soldier is only troublesome when he's more soldier than priest."
"I'll back that," said Mor. "This last skirmish I was in on Association, an elder came down the line after we'd taken one little town and wanted five of my men for hangmen."
"What did you do?" asked Kensie.
"Referred him to my Commandant—and then got to the old man first and told him that if he could find five men in my force who actually wanted such a job, he could transfer them out the next day." lan nodded.
"Nothing spoils a man for battle like playing butcher," he said.
"The old man got that," said Mor. "They got their hangmen, I heard—but not from me."
"The lusts are vampires," said Eachan, heavily, from the head of the table. "Soldiering is a pure art. A man with a taste for blood, money or women was one I never trusted."
"The women are fine on Mara and Kultis," grinned Mor. "I hear."
"I'll not deny it," said Kensie, merrily. "But you've got to come home, some day."
"God grant that you all may," said Eachan, somberly. "I am a Dorsai and a Graeme, but if this little world of ours had something else to trade for the contracts of out-world professionals besides the blood of our best fighting men, I'd be more pleased."
"Would you have stayed home, Eachan," said Mor, "when you were young and had two good legs?"
"No, Mor," said Eachan, heavily. "But mere are other arts, beside the art of war—even for a Dorsai." He looked at his eldest son. "When our forefathers settled this world less than a hundred and fifty years ago, it wasn't with the intention of providing gun-fodder for me other eight systems. They only wanted a world where no man could bend the destinies of another man against that second man's will."
"And that we have," said lan, bleakly.
"And that we have," echoed Eachan. "The Dorsai is a tree world where any man can do as he likes as long as he respects the rights of his neighbor. Not all the other eight systems combined would tike to try their luck with this one world. But the price—the price—" He shook his head and refilled his glass.
"Now those are heavy words for a son who's just going out," said Kensie. "There's a lot of good in life just the way she is now. Beside, it's economic pressures we're under today, not military. Who'd want the Dorsai, anyway, besides us? We're all nut here, and very little kernel. Take one of the rich new worlds—like Ceta under Tau Ceti—or one of the richer, older worlds like Freiland, or Newton—or even old Venus herself. They've got cause to worry. They're the ones that are at each other's throats for the best scientists, the best technicians, the top artists and doctors. And the more work for us and the better life for us, because of it."
"Eachan's right though, Kensie," growled lan. "They still dream of squeezing our free people up into one lump and then negotiating with that lump for the force to get the whip hand over all the other worlds." He leaned forward across the table toward Eachan and in the muted light of the dining room Donal saw the sudden white flash of the seared scar that coiled up his forearm like a snake and was lost in the loose sleeve of his short, undress tunic. "That's the danger we'll never be free of."
"As long as the cantons remain independent of the Council," said Eachan, "and the families remain independent of the cantons, there'll be no success for mem, lan." He nodded at all about the table. "That's my end of the job here at home. You can-go out to the wars with easy consciences. I promise you your children will grow up free in this house—free of any man's will—or the house will no longer stand."
"I trust you," said lan. His eyes were gleaming pale as the scar in the dimness and he was very close to that Dorsai violence of emotion that was at once so cold and so deadly. "I have two boys now under mis roof. But remember no men are perfect—even the Dorsai. There was Mahub Van Ghent only five years back, who dreamed about a little kingdom among the Dorsai in the Midland South—only five years ago, Eachan!"
"He was on the other side of the world," said Eachan. "And he's dead now, at the hand of one of the Benali, his closest neighbor. His home is burnt and no man acknowledges himself a Van Ghent any more. What more do you want?"
"He should have been stopped sooner."
"Each man has a right to his own destiny," said
Eacban, softly. "Until he crosses the line into another man's. His family has suffered enough."
"Yes," said lan. He was calming down. He poured himself another drink. "That's true—that's true. They're not to blame,"
"About the Exotics—" said Mor, gently.
"Oh, yes," answered Kensie, as if the twin brother that was so much a part of himself had never gotten excited at all. "Mara and Kultis—interesting worlds. Don't mistake them if you ever go there, Mor—or you either, Donal. They're sharp enough, for all their art and robes and trappings. They won't fight themselves, but they know how to hire good men. There's things being done on Mara and Kultis—and not only in the arts. Meet one of their psychologists, one time."
"They're honest," said Eachan.
"That, too," said Kensie. "But what catches at me is the fact they're going some place, in their own way. If I had to pick one of the other worlds to be born on—"
"I would always be a soldier," said Mor.
"You think so now," said Kensie, and drank. "You think so now. But it's a wild civilization we have nowadays, with its personality split a dozen different ways by a dozen different cultures. Less than five hundred years ago the average man never dreamed of getting his feet off the ground. And the farther we go the faster. And the faster the farther."
"It's the Venus group forcing that, isn't it?" asked
Donal, his youthful reticence all burnt away in the hot fumes of the whiskey.
"Don't you think it," said Kensie. "Science is only one road to the future. Old Venus, Old Mars— Cassida, Newton—maybe they've had their day. Project Blaine's a rich and powerful old man, but he doesn't know all the new tricks they're dreaming up on Mara and Kultis, or the Friendlies—or Ceta, for that matter. Make it a point to take two good looks at things when you get out among the stars, you two young ones, because nine times out of ten that first glance will leave you fooled."
"Listen to him, boys," said Eachan from the top of the table. "Your uncle Kensie's a man and a half above the shoulders. I just wish I had as good advice to give you. Tell them, Kensie."
"Nothing stands still," said Kensie—and with those three words, the whiskey seemed to go to Donal's head in a rush, the table and the dark harsh-boned faces before him seemed to swim in the dimness of the dining room, and Kensie's voice came roaring at him as if from a great distance. "Everything changes, and that's what you must bear in mind. What was true yesterday about something may not be true today. So remember that and take no man's word about something without reservation, even mine. We have multiplied like the biblical locusts and spread out among the stars, splitting into different groups with different ways. Now, while we still seem to be rushing forward to where I have no idea, at a terrific rate, increasing all the time, I have this feeling—as if we are all poised, hanging on the brink of something, something great and different and maybe terrible. It's a time to walk cautious, it is indeed."
"I'll be the greatest general that ever was!" cried Donal, and was startled as the rest to hear the words leap, stumbling and thick-tongued, but loud, from within him. "They'll see—I'll show them what a Dorsai can be!"
He was aware of them looking at him, though all their faces were blurred, except—by some trick of vision—that of Kensie, diagonally across the table from him. Kensie was considering him with somber, reading eyes. Donal was conscious of his father's hand on his shoulder.
"Time to turn in," said his father.
"You'll see—" said Donal, thickly. But they were all rising, picking up their glasses and turning to his father, who held his own glass up.
"May we all meet again," said his father. And they drank, standing. The remains of the whiskey in his glass flowed tasteless as water down Donal's tongue and throat—and for a second everything cleared and be saw these tall men standing around him. Big, even for Dorsai, they were; even his brother Mor topping him by half a head, so that he stood like a half-grown boy among them. But at that same instant of vision he was suddenly wrung with a terrible tenderness and pity for them, as if he was the grown one, and they the children to be protected. He opened his mouth to say, for once in his life, how much he loved them, and how always he would be there to take care of them—and then the fog closed down again; and he was only aware of Mor leading him stumblingly to his room.
Later, he opened his eyes in the darkness to become aware of a dim figure drawing the curtains of his room against the bright new light of the double moon, just risen. It was his mother; and with a sudden, reflexive action he rolled off his bed and lurched to her and put his hands on her shoulders.
"Mother—" he said.
She looked up at him with a pale face softened by the moonlight.
"Donal," she said tenderly, putting her arms around him. "You'll catch cold, Donal."
"Mother—" he said, thickly. "If you ever need me ... to take care of you—"
"Oh, my boy," she said, holding his hard young body tightly to her, "take care of yourself; my boy ... my boy—"
MERCENARY
Donal shrugged his shoulders in the tight civilian half-jacket and considered its fit as reflected in the mirror of his tiny, boxlike cabin. The mirror gave him back the image of someone almost a stranger. So much difference had three short weeks brought about in him, already. Not that he was so different, but his own appraisal of himself had changed; so that it was not merely the Spanish-style jacket, the skintight under-tunic, and the narrow trousers that disappeared into boots as black as all the rest of the costume, that made him unfamiliar to himself—but the body within. Association with the men of other worlds had done this to his point of view. Their relative shortness had made him tall, their softness had made him hard, their untrained bodies had made his balanced and sure. Outbound from the Dorsai to Alpha
Centauri and surrounded by other Dorsai passengers, he had not noticed the gradual change. Only in the vast terminal on Newton, surrounded by their noisy thousands, had it come on him, all at once. And now, transhipped and outbound for the Friendlies, facing his first dinner on board a luxury-class liner where there would probably be no others from his world, he gazed at himself in the mirror and felt himself as suddenly come of age.
He went out through the door of his cabin, letting it latch quietly behind him, and turned right in the tightly narrow, metal-walled corridor faintly stale with the smell of dust from the carpet underfoot. He walked down its silence toward the main lounge and pushed through a heavy sealing door that sucked shut behind him, into the corridor of the next section.
He stepped into the intersection of the little cross corridor that led right and left to the washrooms of the section ahead—and almost strode directly into a slim, tall girl in an ankle-length, blue dress of severe and conservative cut, who stood by the water fountain at the point of the intersection. She moved hastily back out of his way with a little intake of breath, backing into the corridor to the women's washroom. They stared at each other, halted, for a second.
"Forgive me," said Donal, and took two steps onward—but between these and a third, some sudden swift prompting made him change his mind without warning; and he turned back.
"If you don't mind—" he said.
"Oh, excuse me." She moved back again from the water fountain. He bent to drink; and when he raised his head from the fountain, he looked her full in the face again and recognized what had brought him back. The girl was frightened; and that strange, dark ocean of feeling that lay at the back of his oddness had stirred to the gust of her palpable fear.
He saw her now, clearly and at once; at close range. She was older than he had thought at first—at least in her early twenties. But there was a clear-eyed immaturity about her—a hint that her full beauty would come later in life, and much later than that of the usual woman. Now, she was not yet beautiful; merely wholesome-looking. Her hair was a light brown, verging into chestnut, her eyes wide-spaced and so clearly green that, opening as she felt the full interest of his close gaze, they drove all the other color about her from his mind. Her nose was slim and straight, her mourn a little wide, her chin firm; and the whole of her face so perfectly in balance, the left side with the right, that it approached the artificiality of some sculptor's creation.
"Yes?" she said, on a little gasping intake of breath—and he saw, suddenly, that she was shrinking from him and his close survey of her.
He frowned at her. His thoughts were galloping ahead with the situation, so that when he spoke, it was unconsciously in the middle of me conversation he had in mind, rather than at the beginning. "Tell me about it," said Donal. "You?" she said. Her hand went to her throat above the high collar of her dress. Then, before he could speak again, it fell to her side and some of the tightness leaked out of her. "Oh," she said. "I see."
"See what?" said Donal, a little sharply; for unconsciously he had fallen into the tone he would have used to a junior cadet these last few years, if he had discovered one of them in some difficulty. "You'll have to tell me what your trouble is, if I'm going to be any help to you."
'Tell you—?" she looked desperately around her, as if expecting someone to come upon them at any moment "How do I know you're what you say you are?"
For the first time Donal check-reined the horses of his galloping estimate of the situation; and, looking back, discovered a possible misconception on her part
"I didn't say I was anybody," he answered. "And in fact—I'm not I just happened to be passing by and saw you seemed upset about something. I offered to help."
"Help?" Her eyes widened again and her face suddenly paled. "Oh, no—" she murmured, and tried to go around him. "Please let me go. Please!"
He stood his ground.
"You were ready to accept help from someone like me, if he could only provide proofs of identity, a second ago," said Donal. "You might as well tell me the rest of it."
That stopped her efforts to escape. She stiffened, facing him.
"I haven't told you anything."
"Only," said Donal, ironically, "that you were waiting here for someone. That you did not know that someone by sight, but expected him to be a man. And that you were not sure of his bona fides, but very much afraid of missing him." He heard the hard edge in his own voice and forced it to be more gentle. "Also that you're very frightened and not very experienced at what you're doing. Logic could take it further."
But she had herself under control now. "Will you move out of the way and let me by?" she said evenly. "Logic might make it that what you're engaged in is something illegal," he replied.
She sagged under the impact of his last word as if it had been a blow; and, turning her face blindly to the wall, she leaned against it.
"What are you?" she said brokenly. "Did they send you to trap me?"
"I tell you," said Donal, with just a hint of exasperation, "Fm nothing but a passer-by who thought maybe I could help."
"Oh, I don't believe you!" she said, twisting her face away from him. "If you're really nobody ... if nobody sent you ... you'll let me go. And forget you ever saw me."
"Small sense in that," said Donal. "You need help evidently. I'm equipped to give it. I'm a professional soldier. A Dorsai."
"Oh," she said. The tension drained from her. She stood straighter and met his eyes with a look in which he thought he read some contempt. '"One of those."
"Yes," he said. Then frowned. "What do you mean one of thoseT
"I understand," she answered. "You're a mercenary."
"I prefer the term professional soldier," he said—a little stiffly in his turn.
"The point is," she said, "you're for hire."
He felt himself growing cold and angry. He inclined his head to her and stepped back, leaving her way clear. "My mistake," he said, and turned to leave her.
"No, wait a minute," she said. "Now that I know what you really are, there's no reason why I can't use you."
"None at all, of course," said Donal.
She reached in through a slit in her tight gown and produced a small, thick folding of some printed matter, which she pushed into his hand.
"You see this is destroyed," she said. "I'll pay you—whatever the usual rates are." Her eyes widened suddenly as she saw him unfold what he held and start to read it. "What are you going? You aren't supposed to read that! How dare you!"
She grabbed for the sheet, but he pushed her back absently with one hand. His gaze was busily running down the form she had given him, his own eyes widening at the sight of the facsimile portrait on it, which was that of the girl herself.
"Anea Marlivana," he said. "Select of Kultis." J "Well, what if I am?" she blazed. "What about it?" - "Only," said Donal, "that I expected your genes to £ imply intelligence."
Her mouth fell open.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Only that you're one of the worst fools I've had the bad fortune to meet." He put the sheet into his pocket. "I'll take care of it."
"You will?" Her face lit up. A second later it was twisted in wrath. "Oh, I don't like you!" she cried. "I don't like you at all!"
He looked at her a little sadly.
"You will," he said, "if you live long enough." He turned about and pushed open the door through which he had come just a few minutes ago.
"But wait a minute—" her voice leaped after him. "Where will I see you after you've got rid of it? How much do I have to pay—"
He let the door, sucking to behind him, be the period to that question of hers—and his answer to it.
He went back through the section he had just traversed to his own cabin. There., with the door locked he considered the sheet she had given him, a little more closely. It was nothing more—and nothing less—than a five-year employment contract, a social contract, for her services as companion in the entourage of William, Prince, and Chairman of the Board of that very commercial planet Ceta which was the only habitable world circling the sun Tau Ceti. And a very liberal social contract it was, requiring no more than that she accompany William wherever he wished to go and supply her presence at such public and polite social functions as he might require. It was not the Hberalness of the contract that surprised him so much—a Select of Kultis would hardly be contracted to perform any but the most delicately moral and ethical of duties—but the fact that she had asked him to destroy it. Theft of contract from her employer was bad enough, breach of contract infinitely worse—calling for complete rehabilitation—but destruction of contract required the death penalty wherever any kind of government operated. The girl, he thought, must be insane.
But—and here the fine finger of irony intruded into the situation—being the Select of Kultis she could not possibly be insane, any more than an ape could be an elephant. On the extreme contrary, being die product of a number of the most carefully culled forebearers on that planet where careful genetic culling and wizardry of psychological techniques was commonplace, she must be eminently sane. True, she had impressed Donal on first acquaintance as possessing nothing much out of the ordinary except a suicidal foolishness. But this was one instance where you had to go by the record books. And the record books implied that if anything about this business was abnormal, it was the situation itself, and not the girl involved in it.
Thoughtfully, Donal fingered the contract. Anea had clearly had no conception at all of what she was requesting when she so blithely required him to destroy it. The single sheet he held, and even the words and signatures upon it, were all integral parts of a single giant molecule which in itself was well-nigh indestructible and could not be in any way altered or tampered with short of outright destruction. As for destruction itself—Donal was quite sure that there was nothing aboard this ship that could in any way burn, shred, dissolve, or in any other fashion obliterate it. And the mere possession of it by anyone but William, its rightful owner, was as good as an order of sentence.
A soft chime quivered on the air of his cabin, announcing the serving of a meal in the main lounge. It chimed twice more to indicate that this was the third of the four meals interspersed throughout the ship "day." Contract in hand, Donal half-turned toward the little orifice of the disposal slot that led down to the central incinerator. The incinerator, of course, was not capable of disposing of the contract—but it might be that it could lie unnoticed there until the ship had reached its destination and its passengers had dispersed. Later, it would be difficult for William to discover how it had reached the incinerator in the first place.
Then he shook his head, and replaced the contract in his pocket. His motives for doing so were not entirely clear to himself. It was that oddness of his at work again, he thought. Also, he told himself that it seemed a sloppy way of handling the situation this girl had got him into. Quite typically, he had already forgotten that his participation in the matter was all of his own contriving.
He straightened his half-jacket and went out of his cabin and down the long corridor through various sections to the main lounge. A slight crowding of likewise dinner-bound passengers in the narrow en- trance to the lounge delayed him momentarily; and, in that moment, looking over the heads of those before him, he caught sight of the long captain's table at the far end of the lounge and of the girl, Anea Marlivana, amongst those seated at it.
The others seated with her appeared to consist of a strikingly handsome young officer of field rank—a Freilander, by the look of him—a rather untidy, large young man almost as big as the Freilander, but possessing just the opposite of the other's military bearing; in fact, he appeared to half-slouch in his seat as if he were drunk. And a spare, pleasant-looking man in early middle age with iron-gray hair. The fifth person at the table was quite obviously a Dorsai—a massive, older man in the uniform of a Freiland marshal. The sight of this last individual moved Donal to sudden action. He pushed abruptly through the little knot of people barring the entrance and strode openly across the room to the high table. He extended his fist across it to the Dorsai marshal.
"How do you do, sir," he said. "I was supposed to look you up before the ship lifted; but I didn't have time. I've got a letter for you from my father, Eachan Khan Graeme. I'm his second son, Donal."
Blue Dorsai eyes as cold as river water lifted under thick gray brows to consider him. For pan of a second the situation trembled on the balance-point of Dorsai pride with the older man's curiosity weighed against the bare-faced impudence of Donal's claim to acquaintance. Then the marshal took Donal's fist in a hard grip.
"So he remembered Hendrik Gait, did he?" the marshal smiled. "I haven't heard from Eachan for years."
Donal felt a slight, cold shiver of excitement course down his spine. Of all people, he had chosen one of the ranking Dorsai soldiers of his day to bluff acquaintance with. Hendrik Gait, First Marshal of Freiiand.
"He sends you his regards, sir," said Donal, "and ... but perhaps I can bring you the letter after dinner and you can read it for yourself."
'To be sure," said the marshal. "I'm in Stateroom Nineteen."
Donal was still standing. The occasion could hardly be prolonged further. But rescue came—as something in Donal had more than half-expected it would—from farther down the table.
"Perhaps," said the gray-haired man in a soft and pleasant voice, "your young friend would enjoy eating with us before you take him back to your stateroom, Hendrik?"
"I'd be honored," said Donal, with glib promptness. He pulled out the empty float before him and sat down upon it, nodding courteously to the rest of the company at the table as he did so. The eyes of the girl met him from the table's far end. They were as hard and still as emeralds caught in the rock.
MERCENARY II
"Anea Marlivana," said Hendrik Gait, introducing Donal around the table. "And the gentleman who was pleased to invite you—William of Ceta, Prince and Chairman of the Board."
"Greatly honored," murmured Donal, inclining his bead toward them.
"... The Unit Commandant, here, my adjutant... Hugh Killien—"
Donal and the Commandant Freilander nodded to each other.
"... And ArDell Montor, of Newton." The loose-Limbed young man slumping in his float, lifted a careless, half-drunken hand in a slight wave of acknowledgment. His eyes—so dark as to appear almost black under the light eyebrows that matched his rather heavy, blond hair, cleared for a disconcerting fraction of a second to stare sharply at Donal, then faded back to indifference. "ArDell," said Gait, humorlessly, "set a new high score for the competitive exams on Newton. His field was social dynamics."
"Indeed," muttered the Newtonian, with something between a snort and a laugh. "Indeed, was. Was, indeed." He lifted a heavy tumbler from the table before him and buried his nose in its light golden contents.
"ArDell—" said the gray-haired William, gently reproving. ArDell lifted his drink-pale face and stared at the older man, snorted again, on laughter, and lifted the tumbler again to his lips.
"Are you enlisted somewhere at the moment, Graeme?" asked the Freilander, turning to Donal.
"I've a tentative contract for the Friendlies," said Donal. "I thought I'd pick between the Sects when I got there and had a chance to look over the opportunities for action."
"Very Dorsai of you," said William, smiling, from the far end of the table, next to Anea. "Always the urge to battle."
"You over-compliment me, sir," said Donal. "It merely happens that promotion comes more quickly on a battlefield than in a garrison, under ordinary conditions.
"You're too modest," said William.
"Yes, indeed," put in Anea, suddenly. "Far too modest."
William turned about to gaze quizzically at the girl.
"Now, Anea," he said. "You mustn't let your Exotic contempt for violence breed a wholly unjustified contempt for this fine young man. I'm sure both Hendrik and Hugh agree with him."
"Oh, they would—of course," said Anea, flashing a look at the other two men. "Of course, they would!"
"Well," said William, laughing, "we must make allowances for a Select, of course. As for myself, I must admit to being male enough, and unreconstructed enough, to like the thought of action, myself. I ... ah, here comes the food."
Brimming soup plates were rising above the surface of the table in front of everybody but Donal.
"You'd better get your order in now," said William. And, while Donal pressed the communicator key before him and attended to this necessary duty, the rest of them lifted their spoons and began their meal.
"... Donal's father was a classmate of yours, was he, Hendrik?" inquired William, as the fish course was being served.
"Merely a close friend," said the marshal, dryly.
"Ah," said William, delicately lifting a portion of the white, delicate flesh on a fork. "I envy you Dorsai for things like that. Your professions allow you to keep friendship and emotional connections unrelated to your work. In the Commercial area"—he gestured with a slim, tanned hand—"a convention of general friendliness obscures the deeper feelings."
"Maybe it's what the man is to begin with," answered the marshal. "Not all Dorsal are soldiers, Prince, and not all Cetans are entrepreneurs."
"I recognize that," said William. His eyes strayed to Donal. "What would you say, Donal? Are you a simple mercenary soldier, only, or do you find yourself complicated by other desires?"
The question was as blunt as it was obliquely put. Donal concluded that ingenuousness overlaid with a touch of venality was perhaps the most proper response.
"Naturally, I'd like to be famous," he said—and laughed a trifle self-consciously, "and rich."
He caught the hint of a darkening cloud on the brow of Gait. But he could not be concerned with that now. He had other fish to fry. There would, he hoped, be a chance to clear up the marshal's contempt for him at some later time. For the present he must seem self-seeking enough to arouse William's interest.
"Very interesting," said William, pleasantly. "How do you plan to go about becoming these pleasant things?"
"I was hoping," said Donal, "maybe to learn something of the worlds by being out among them— something I might be able to use to my own advantage, as well as others."
"Good Lord, is that all?" said the Freilander, and (aughed in a way that invited the rest of the table to join in with him.
William, however, did not laugh—although Anea joined her own clear amusement to that of the commandant, and ArDell's snorted chuckle.
"No need to be unkind, Hugh," he said. "I like Donal's attitude. I had the same sort of notion myself once—when I was younger." He smiled in a kindly fashion on Donal. "You must come talk to me, too," he said, "after you've had your chat with Hendrik. I like young men with ambition."
ArDell snorted with laughter again. William turned to look sadly at him.
"You should try to eat, ArDell," he said. "We'll be making a phase shift in four hours or so; and if you don't have something solid on your stomach—"
"My stomach?" said the young man, drunkenly. "And what if my stomach should reach universal dimensions, out of phase? What if / should reach universal dimensions; and be everywhere and never come back to point position again?" He grinned at Williams. "What a waste of good food."
Anea had paled to a sickly color.
"If you'll excuse me—" she murmured, rising hastily.
"I don't blame you a bit!" said William sharply. "ArDell, that was in inexcusable bad taste. Hugh, help Anea to her stateroom."
"I don't want him!" flared Anea. "He's just like all the rest of you—"
But the Freilander was already on his feet, looking almost like a recruiting poster in his trim uniform and coming around the table to take her arm. She jerked away from him, turned, and went unsteadily out of the lounge. Hugh following closely behind her.
They passed through the doorway into the corridor, but as they turned to move out of sight, Donal saw her turn to the tall soldier and lean into the protection of his arm, just before they disappeared.
William was continuing to speak calm and acid words of disapprobation to ArDell, who made no retort, but gazed drunkenly and steadily back at him out of his black, unmoving eyes. During the rest of the meal the talk turned to military affairs, in particular field strategy, in which triologue—ArDell pointedly excluded—Donal was able to win back some of the personal credit which his earlier remark about fame and riches had cost him—in the marshal's eyes.
"... Remember," William said, as they parted in the corridor outside the lounge, after the meal. "Come in and see me after you've finished with Hendrik, Donal. I'll be glad to help you if I can." And with a smile, and a nod, he turned away.
Donal and Gait went off down the narrow corridor .that forced them to walk one behind the other. Following the thick shoulders of the older man, Donal was surprised to hear him ask: "Well, what do you think of them?"
"Sir?" said Donal. Hesitating, he chose what he took to be the safest subject. "I'm a little surprised about the girl."
"Anea?" said Gaft, stopping before a door marked with the number nineteen.
"I thought a Select of Kultis would be—" Donal stopped, honestly at a loss, "more ... more in control of herself."
"She's very healthy, very normal, very intelligent— but those are only potentialities," retorted the marshal, almost gruffly. "What did you expect?"
He threw open the door, ushered them both in, and closed the door firmly behind them. When he turned around, there was a harder, more formal note to his voice.
"All right now," he said, sharply, "what's ail this about a letter?"
Donal took a deep breath. He had tried hard to read Gait's character during the course of the dinner—and he staked everything now in the honesty of his answer, on what he thought he had seen there.
"No letter, sir," he said. 'To the best of my knowledge, my father never met you in his life."
"Thought as much," said Gait. "All right—what's it all about, then?" He crossed to a desk on the other side of the room, took something from a drawer, and when he turned about Donal was astonished to find him filling an antique pipe _ with tobacco.
"That Anea, sir," he said. "I never met such a foot in my life." And he told, fully and completely, the story of the episode in the corridor. Gait half-sat on the edge of the desk, the pipe in his mouth now, and alight, puffing little clouds of white smoke which the ventilating system whisked away the second they were formed.
"I see," he said, when Donal had finished. "I'm inclined to agree with you. She is a fool. And just what sort of insane idiot do you consider yourself?"
"I, sir?" Donal was honestly astonished.
"I mean you, boy," said Gait, taking the pipe out of his mouth. "Here you are, still damp from school, and sticking your nose into a situation a full planetary government'd hesitate at." He stared in frank amazement at Donal. "Just what did you think— what did you figure ... hell, boy, what did you plan to get out of it?"
"Why, nothing," said Donal. "I was only interested in seeing a ridiculous and possibly dangerous situation smoothed out as neatly as possible. I admit I hadn't any notion of the part William played in the matter—he's apparently an absolute devil."
The pipe rattled in Gait's suddenly unclenched jaws and he had to grab it quickly with one thick hand to keep it from falling. He took it from his lips and stared in amazement at Donal.
"Who told you that?" he demanded.
"No one," said Donal. "It's obvious, isn't it?" Gait laid his pipe down on the table and stood up.
"Not to ninety-nine per cent of the civilized worlds, it isn't," he retorted. "What made it so obvious to you?"
"Certainly," said Donal, "any man can be judged by the character and actions of the people with which, he surrounds himself. And this William has an entourage of thwarted and ruined people."
The marshal stiffened.
"You mean me?" he demanded.
"Naturally not," said Donal. "After all—you're a Dorsai." The stiffness went out of Gait. He grinned a little sourly and, reaching back for his pipe, retrieved and relit it.
"Your faith in our common origin is ... quite re- freshing," he said. "Go on. On this piece of evidence you read William's character, do you?"
"Oh, not just that," said Donal. "Stop and think of the fact that a Select of Kultis finds herself at odds with him. And the good instincts of a Select are inbred. Also, he seems to be an almost frighteningly brilliant sort of man, in that he can dominate personalities like Anea, and this fellow Montor, from Newton—who must be a rather high-level mind himself to have rated as he did on his tests."
"And someone that brilliant must be a devil?" queried Gait, dryly.
"Not at all," explained Donal, patiently. "But having such intellectual capabilities, a man must show proportionately greater inclinations toward either good or evil than lesser people. If he tends toward evil, he may mask it in himself—he may even mask its effect on the people with which he surrounds himself. But he has no way of producing the reflections of good which would ordinarily be reflected from his lieutenants and initiates—and which, if he was truly good—he would have no reason to try and hide. And by that lack, you can read him."
Gait took the pipe from his mouth and gave a long, slow whistle. He stared at Donal.
"You weren't brought up on one of the Exotics, by any chance, were you?" he asked.
"No, sir," said Donal. "My father's mother was a Maran, though. And my mother's mother was Ma-ran."
"This," Gait paused and tamped thoughtfully in the bowl of his pipe—it had gone out—with one thick forefinger, "business of reading character—did you get this from your mother, or your grandmother—or is it your own idea?"
"Why, I imagine I must have heard it somewhere," replied Donal. "But surely it stands to reason— anyone would arrive at it as a conclusion, with a few minutes' thought."
"Possibly the majority of us don't think," said Gait, with the same dryness. "Sit down, Donal. And I'll join you."
They took a couple of armchair floats facing each other. Gait put his pipe away.
"Now, listen to me," he said, in a low and sober voice. "You're one of the oddest young fish I can remember meeting. I don't know quite what to do with you. If you were my son, I'd pack you up in quarantine and ship you home for ten more years seasoning before I let you out among the stars—all right—" he interrupted himself abruptly, raising a silencing hand as Donal's mouth opened. "I know you're a man now and couldn't be shipped anywhere against your will. But the way you strike me now is that you've got perhaps one chance in a thousand of becoming something remarkable, and about nine hundred and ninety-nine chances of being quietly put out of the way before the year's out. Look, boy, what do you know about the worlds, outside the Dorsai?"
"Well," said Donal. "There are fourteen planetary governments not counting the anarchic setups on Dunnin's World and Coby—"
"Governments, my rear echelon!" interrupted Gait, rudely. "Forget your civics lessons! Governments in this twenty-fourth century are mere machinery. It's the men who control them who count. Project Blaine, on Venus; Sven Holman, on Earth; Eldest Bright on Harmony, the very planet we're headed for—and Sayona the Bond on Kultis, for the Exotics."
"General Kamal—" began Donal.
"Is nothing!" said Gait, sharply. "How can the Elector of the Dorsai be anything when every little canton hangs to its independence with tooth and nail? No, I'm talking about the men who pull the strings between the stars. The ones I mentioned, and others." He took a deep breath. "Now, how do you suppose our Merchant Prince and Chairman of the Board on Ceta ranks with those I mentioned?"
"You'd say he's their equal?
"At least," said Gait. "At least. Don't be led astray by the fact that you see him traveling like this, on a commercial ship, with only the girl and Montor with him. Chances are he owns the ship, the crew and officers—and half the passengers."
"And you and the commandant?" asked Donal, perhaps more bluntly than was necessary. Gait's features started to harden; and then he relaxed.
"A fair question," he rumbled. "I'm trying to get you to question most of the things you've taken for granted. I suppose it's natural you'd include myself. No—to answer your question—I am First Marshal of Freiland, still a Dorsai, and with my professional services for hire, and nothing more. We've just hired out five light divisions to the First Dissident Church, on Harmony, and I'm coming along to observe that they operate as contracted for. It's a complicated deal—like they are all—involving a batch of contract credits belonging to Ceta. Therefore William."
"And the commandant?" persisted Donal.
"What about him?" replied Gait. "He's a Freilander, a professional, and a good one. He'll take over one of the three-Force commands for a short test period when we get to Harmony, for demonstration purposes."
"Have you had him with you long?"
"Oh, about two standard years," said Gait.
"And he's good, professionally?"
"He's damn good," said Gait. "Why do you think he's my adjutant? What're you driving at, anyway?"
"A doubt," said Donal, "and a suspicion." He hesitated for a second. "Neither of which I'm ready to voice yet."
Gait laughed.
"Save that Maran character-sniffing of yours for civilians," he said. "You'll be seeing a snake under every bush. Take my word for it, Hugh's a good, honest soldier—a bit flashy, perhaps—but that's all."
"I'm hardly in a position to argue with you," murmured Donal, stepping aside gracefully. "You were about to say something about William, when I interrupted you?"
"Oh yes," said Gait. He frowned. "It adds up to this—and I'll make it short and clear. The girl's none of your business; and William's deadly medicine. Leave them both alone. And if I can help you to the kind of post you're after—"
"Thank you very much," said Donal. "But I believe William will be offering me something."
Gait blinked and stared.
"Hell's breeches, boy!" he exploded after half a second. "What gives you that idea?"
Donal smiled a little sadly.
"Another one of my suspicions," he said. "Based on what you call that Maran character-sniff ing of mine, no doubt." He stood up. "I appreciate your trying to warn me, sir." He extended his fist. "If I could talk to you again, sometime?"
Gait stood up himself, taking the proffered fist, mechanically.
"Any time," he said. "Damned if I understand you."
Donal peered at him, .suddenly struck by a thought.
"Tell me, sir," he asked. "Would you say I was— odd?"
"Odd!" Gait almost exploded on the word. "Odd as—" his imagination failed him. "What makes you ask that?"
"I just wondered," said Donal. "I've been called that so often. Maybe they were right."
He withdrew his fist from the marshal's grasp. And on that note, he took his leave.
MERCENARY III
Returning again up the corridor toward the bow of the ship, Donal allowed himself to wonder, a little wistfully, about this succubus of his own strange difference from other people. He had thought to leave it behind with his cadet uniform. Instead, it seemed, it continued to ride with him, still perched on his shoulders. Always it had been this way. What seemed so plain, and simple and straightforward to himself, had always struck others as veiled, torturous, and involved. Always he had been like a stranger passing through a town, the ways of whose people were different, and who looked on him with a lack of understanding amounting to suspicion. Their language failed on the doorstep of his motives and could not enter the lonely mansion of his mind. They said "enemy" and "friend"; they said "strong" and "weak"—
"them" and "us". They set up a thousand arbitrary classifications and distinctions which he could not comprehend, convinced as he was that all people were only people—and there was very little to choose between them. Only, you dealt with them as individuals, one by one; and always remembering to be patient. And if you did this successfully, then the larger, group things all came out right.
Turning again into the entrance of the lounge, he discovered—as he had half-expected to—the young Newtonian ArDell Montor, slumped in a float by one end of the bar that had made its appearance as soon as the dinner tables had been taken up into the walls. A couple of other small, drinking groups sparsely completed the inhabitants of the lounge—but none of these were having anything to do with Montor. Donal walked directly to him; and Montor, without moving, lifted the gaze of his dark eyes to watch Donal approach.
"Join you?" said Donai.
"Honored," replied the other—not so much thickly as slowly, from the drink inside him. "Thought I might like to talk to you." His fingers crept out over the buttons on the bar-pad next to him. "Drink?"
"Dorsai whiskey," said Donal. Montor pressed. A second later a small transparent goblet, full, rose to the bartop. Donal took it and sipped cautiously. The drinking the night he had attained his majority had acquainted him with the manner in which alcohol affected him; and he had made a private determination never to find himself drunk again. It is a typical matter of record with him, that he never did. Raising his eyes from the glass, he found the Newtonian staring steadily at him with his eyes unnaturally clear, lost, and penetrating.
"You're younger than I," said ArDell. "Even if I don't look it. How old do you think I am?"
Donal looked him over curiously. Montor's face, for all its lines of weariness and dissipation, was the scarcely mature visage of a late adolescent—a situation to which his shock of uncombed hair and the loose-limbed way he sprawled in his float, contributed.
"A quarter of a standard century," said Donal.
'Thirty-three years absolute," said ArDell. "I was a school-child, a monk, until I was twenty-nine. Do you think I drink too much?"
"I think there's no doubt about it," answered Donal.
"I agree with you," said ArDell, with one of his sudden snorts of laughter. "I agree with you. There's no doubt about it—one of the few things in this God-abandoned universe about which there is no doubt. But that's not what I was hoping to talk to you about."
"What was that?" Donal tasted his glass of whiskey again.
"Courage," said ArDell, looking at him with an empty, penetrating glance. "Have you got courage?"
"It's a necessary item for a soldier," said Donal. "Why do you ask?"
"And no doubts? No doubts?" ArDell swirled the golden drink in his tall tumbler and took a swallow from it. "No secret fears that when the moment comes your legs will weaken, your heart will pound, you'll turn and run?"
"I will not, of course, turn and run," said Donal. "After all, I'm a Dorsai. As for how 1*11 feel—all I can say is, I've never felt the way you describe. And even if I did—"
Above their heads a single mellow chime sounded, interrupting.
"Phase shift in one standard hour and twenty minutes," announced a voice. "Phase shift in one standard hour and twenty minutes. Passengers are advised to take their medication now and accomplish the shift while asleep, for their greatest convenience."
"Have you swallowed a pill yet?" asked- ArDeli.
"Not yet," said Donal.
"But you will?"
"Of course." Donal examined him with interest. "Why not?"
"Doesn't taking medication to avoid the discomfort, of a phase shift strike you as a form of cowardice?" asked ArDell. "Doesn't it?"
"That's foolish," said Donal. "Like saying it's cowardly to wear clothes to keep you warm and comfortable, or to eat, to keep from starving. One is a matter of convenience; the other is a matter of—he thought for a second—"duty."
"Courage is doing your duty?"
"... In spite of what you personally might want. Yes," said Donal.
"Yes," said ArDell, thoughtfully. "Yes." He replaced his empty glass on the bar and pressed for a refill. "I thought you had courage," he said, musingly, watching the glass sink, fill, and begin to re-emerge.
"I am a Dorsai," said Donal.
"Oh, spare me the glories of careful breeding!" said ArDel], harshly, picking up his now-full glass. As he turned back to face Donal, Donal saw the man's face was tortured. "There's more to courage than that. If it was only in your genes—" he broke off suddenly, and leaned toward Donal. "Listen to me," he almost whispered. "I'm a coward."
"Are you sure?" said Donal, levelly. "How do you know?"
"I'm frightened sick," whispered ArDell. "Sick-frightened of the universe. What do you know about the mathematics of social dynamics?"
"It's a predicative system of mathematics, isn't it?" said Donal. "My education didn't lie in that direction."
"No, no!" said ArDell, almost fretfully. "I'm talking about the statistics of social analysis, and their extrapolation along lines of population increase and development." He lowered his voice even further. "They approach a parallel with the statistics of random chance!"
"I'm sorry," said Donal. "That means nothing to me."
ArDell gripped Donal's arm suddenly with one surprisingly strong hand.
"Don't you understand?" he murmured. "Random chance provides for every possibility—including dissolution. It must come, because the chance is there.
As our social statistics grow into larger figures, we, too, entertain the possibility. In the end, it must come. We must destroy ourselves. There is no other alternative. And all because the universe is too big a suit of clothes for us to wear. It gives us room to grow too much, too fast. We will reach a statistically critical mass—and then," he snapped his fingers, "the end!"
"Well, that's a problem for the future," said Donal. But then, because he could not help reacting to the way the other man was feeling, he added, more gently, "Why does it bother you, so much?"
"Why, don't you see?" said ArDell. "If it's all to go—just like that—as if it never has been, then what was the use of it all? What's to show for our existence? I don't mean things we built—they decay fast enough. Or knowledge. That's just a copying down from an open book into our own language. It has to be those things that the universe didn't have to begin with and that we brought to it. Things like love, and kindness—and courage."
"If that's the way you feel," said Donal, gently withdrawing his arm from the other's grasp, "why drink this way?"
"Because I am a coward," said ArDell. "I feel it out there, all the time, this enormousness that is the universe. Drinking helps me shut it out—that Godawful knowledge of what it can do to us. That's why I drink. To take the courage I need out of a bottle, to do the little things like passing through phase shift without medication."
"Why," said Donal, almost tempted to smile. "What good would that do?"
"It's facing it, in a little way," ArDell fixed him with his dark and pleading eyes. "It's saying, in one little instance—go ahead, rip me to the smallest shreds you can manage, spread me over your widest limits. I can take it."
Donal shook his head.
"You don't understand," said ArDell, sinking back in his float. "If I could work, I wouldn't need the alcohol. But I'm walled away from work nowadays. It's not that way with you. You've got your job to do; and you've got courage—the real kind. I thought maybe I could . . . well, never mind. Courage wouldn't be transferable, anyway."
"Are you going to Harmony?" asked Donal.
"Whither my Prince goes, there go I," said ArDell, and snorted his laugh again. "You should read my contract, sometime." He turned back to the bar. "Another whiskey?"
"No," said Donal, standing up. "If you'll excuse me—"
"I'll see you again," muttered ArDell, keying for another drink. "I'll be seeing you."
"Yes," said Donal. "Until then."
"Until then," ArDell lifted his newly filled glass from the bar. The chime sounded again overhead, and the voice reminded them that only seventy-odd minutes remained before shift-time. Donal went out.
Half an hour later, after he had gone back to his own room for one more careful rereading and study of
Anea's contract, Donal pressed the button on the door of the stateroom of William, Prince and Chairman of the Board, on Ceta. He waited.
"Yes?" said the voice of William, over his head.
"Donal Graeme, sir," said Donal. "If you aren't busy—"
"Oh, of course—Donal. Come in!" The door swung open before him and Donal entered.
William was sitting on a plain float before a small deskboard holding a pile of papers and a tiny portable secretary. A single light glowed directly above him and the deskboard, silvering his gray hair. Donal hesitated, hearing the door click to behind him.
"Find a seat somewhere," said William, without looking up from his papers. His fingers flickered over the keys of the secretary. "I have some things to do."
Donal turned about in the gloom outside the pool of light, found an armchair float and sat down in it. William continued for some minutes, scanning through his papers, and making notes on the secretary.
After a while he shoved the remaining papers aside and the deskboard, released, drifted with its burden to over against a farther wall. The single overhead light faded and a general illumination flooded the cabin.
Donal blinked at the sudden light. William smiled.
"And now," he said, "what's the nature of your business with me?"
Donal blinked, stared, and blinked again.
"Sir?" he said.
"I think we can avoid wasting time by ignoring pretenses," said William, still in his pleasant voice. "You pushed yourself on us at the table because you wanted to meet someone there. It was hardly the marshal—your Dorsai manners could have found a better way than that. It was certainly not Hugh, and most unlikely to be ArDell. That leaves Anea; and she's pretty enough, and you're both young enough to do something that foolish . . . but, I think not, under the conditions." William folded his lean fin-gers together, and smiled. "That leaves me."
"Sir, I—" Donal started to stand up, with the stiffness of outraged dignity.
"No, no," said William, gesturing him back. "Now it'd be foolish to leave, after going to all this trouble to get here, wouldn't it?" His voice sharpened. "Sit down!"
Donal sat.
"Why did you want to see me?" asked William.
Donal squared his shoulders.
"All right," he said. "If you want me to put it bluntly ... I think I might be useful to you."
"By which," said William, "you think you might be useful to yourself, by tapping the till, as it were, of my position and authority—go on."
"It so happened," said Donal, "that I came into possession of something belonging to you."
William extended his hand, without a word. After a second's hesitation, Donal extracted Anea's contract from his pocket and passed it over. William took it, unfolded it, and glanced over it. He laid it carelessly down on a little table beside him.
"She wanted me to get rid of it for her," said Donal. "She wanted to hire me to dispose of it for her. Evidently she didn't know how hard it is to destroy a sheet of the material contracts are made on."
"But you took the job," said William.
"I made no promises," said Donal, painfully.
"But from the start, you intended to bring it straight to me."
"I believe," said Donal, "it's your property."
"Oh, of course," said William. He smiled at Donal for a long moment. "You realize, of course," he said, finally, "that I needn't believe a word of what you've said. I only need to assume that you stole it yourself and later got cold feet about disposing of it—and dreamed up this cock-and-bull story in a attempt to sell it back to me. The-captain of this ship would be glad to put you under arrest at my word and hold you for trial as soon as we reach Harmony."
A slight, cold, galvanic shiver ran down Donal's spine.
"A Select of Kultis won't lie under oath," he said. "She—"
"I see no reason to involve Anea in this," said William. "It could be all handled very conveniently without her. My statement against yours."
Donal said nothing. William smiled again.
"You see," said William, "the point I'm laboring to bring home to you. You happen not only to be venal, but a fool."
"Sir!" the word shot from Donal's lips. William waved a disinterested hand.
"Save your Dorsai rages for someone who'll be
49m impressed by them. I know as well as you do, you've no intention of attacking me. Possibly, if you were a different sort of Dorsai—but you're not. You are as I say, both venal and a fool. Accept these statements for the obvious facts they are; and we can get down to business."
He looked at Donal. Donal said nothing.
"Very well, then," went on William. "You came to me, hoping I could find you of some use. As it happens, I can. Anea is, of course, just a foolish young girl—but for her benefit, as well as my own, being her employer, we'll have to see she doesn't get into serious trouble. Now, she had confided in you once. She may again. If she does so—by no means discourage her. And to keep you available for such confidences," William smiled again, quite good*humoredly, this time, "I believe I can find you a commission as Force-Leader, under Commandant Hugh Kiliien, when we touch down on Harmony. There is no reason why a military career shouldn't go hand in hand with whatever other uses I can find for you."
"Thank you, sir," said Donal.
"Not at all—" A chime sounded over some hidden wall speaker. "Ab—phase shift in five minutes." William picked up a small silver box from a table near his feet, and sprung it open. "Have you taken your medication, yet? Help yourself."
He extended to Donal.
"Thank you, sir," said Donal carefully. "I have."
"Then," said William, helping himself to a white tablet, and replacing the box. "I believe that is all."
"I believe so, sir," said Donal.
Donal inclined his head and went out. Stopping outside the stateroom door only long enough to take one of his own phase shift sedatives, he headed back toward his own stateroom. On the way, he stopped by the ship's library to check out an information spool on the First Dissident Church, of Harmony; and this delayed him sufficiently so that he was passing down one of the long sectional corridors when the phase shift occurred.
He had been prudently asleep during those previous shifts he had gone through while outbound from Dorsai; and, of course, he had learned years ago what to expect. In addition, he was fully medicated; and the shift itself was over before it was really begun. In fact, it took place in no time, in no conceivable interval at all. Yet it had happened; and some inextinguishable recognizing part of him knew and remembered that he had been torn apart, down to the most fractional elements of his being, and spread to the wide universe and caught and collected and reassembled at some arbitrary point light-years from his destruction. And it was this memory, not the shift itself, that made him falter, for one short step, before he took up again his steady march back to his stateroom. And the memory would stay with him.
He continued on down the corridor; but he was far from having run his gauntlet for the day. As he reached the end of one section, Anea stepped out from the cross-bar corridor there that was the exact duplicate of the one, several sections down, where he first met her. Her green eyes were afire.
"You've been seeing him!" she snapped, barring his way.
"Seeing ... oh, William," he said.
"Don't deny it."
"Why should I?" Donal looked at her almost with wonder. "Surely, it's nothing to make a secret about?"
She stared at him.
"Oh!" she cried. "You just don't care for anything, do you? What did you do ... about what I gave you?"
"I gave it back to its owner, of course," said Donal. "There was no other sensible thing I could do."
She turned suddenly so white that he almost reached out to catch her, certain she was about to faint. But she did no such womanish thing. Her eyes, as she stared at him, were shocked to enormity.
"Oh!" she breathed. "You . . . you traitor. You cheat*" and before he could make a move or say a word to stop her, she had whirled about and was running off down the corridor back in the direction from which she had come.
With a certain wry unhappiness—for, in spite of his rather low opinion of her common sense, he had really expected her to listen to his explanation—he took up his solitary walk to his stateroom. He traveled the rest of the way without meeting anyone. The corridors, in the aftermath of the phase shift were deserted by prudent passengers.
Only, passing a certain stateroom, he heard sounds of sickness from within; and, looking up, recognized the number on its door as one he had looked up just now on his recent trip to the library.
It was the stateroom of ArDell Montor; and that would be the man himself inside it now, unraedicated and racked by the passing of the phase shift, fighting his own long battle with the universe.
FORCE-LEADER
"All right, gentlemen," said Hugh Killien.
He stood, confident and impressive in his chameleon battle-dress, with the fingertips of his right hand resting on the gently domed surface of the mapviewer before him.
"If you'll gather around the viewer, here—" he said. The five Force-Leaders moved in until all six men stood thickly clustered around the meter-square area of the viewer. The illumination from the blackout shell enclosing them beat down and met the internal upward illumination of the viewer, so that Donal, glancing around at his fellow-officers, was irresistibly reminded of men caught between wrath and wrath, in some small package section of that hell their First Dissident Church Liaison-Elder had been so eloquent about, only a few hours since at the before-battle service.
"... Our position is here," Hugh was saying. "As your commandant I make you the customary assurance that it is a perfectly tenable position and that the contemplated advance in no way violates the Mercenaries Code. Now—" he went on more briskly, "as you can see, we occupy an area five kilometers in front and three kilometers in depth, between these two ridges. Second Command of Battle Unit 176 to our right, Fourth Command of Battles to our left.
"The contemplated action calls for the Second and Fourth Commands to hold fast in full strength on both our flanks, while we move forward at sixty per cent of strength and capture a small town called Faith Will Succour, which is here—"
His index finger stabbed down and rested upon the domed image of the map.
"... At approximately four kilometers of distance from our present position. We will use three of our five Forces, Skuak's, White's and Graeme's; and each Force will make its separate way to the objective. You will each have your individual maps. There are woods for the first twelve hundred meters. After that, you will have to cross the river, which is about forty meters in width, but which Intelligence assures us is fordable at the present time with a maximum depth of a hundred and twenty centimeters. On the other side it will be woods again, thinning out gradually right up to the edge of the town. We leave in twenty minutes. It'll be dawn in an hour and I want all three Forces across that river before full daylight. Any questions?"
"What about enemy activity in the area?" asked Skuak. He was a short, stocky Cassidan, who looked Mongoloid, but was actually Eskimo in ancestry. "What kind of opposition can we expect?"
"Intelligence says nothing but patrols. Possibly a small Force holding the town, itself. Nothing more." Hugh looked around the circle of faces. 'This should be bread and butter. Any more questions?"
"Yes," said Donal. He had been studying the map. "What sort of military incompetent decided to send us at only sixty per cent of strength?"
The atmosphere in the shell froze suddenly and sharply. Donal looked up to find Hugh Killien's eyes on his across the viewer,
"As it happened," said the commandant, a slight edge to his words, "it was my suggestion to Staff, Graeme. Perhaps you've forgotten—I'm sure none of the other Force-Leaders have—but this is a demonstration campaign to show the First Dissident Church we're worthy of our hire."
"That hardly includes gambling the lives of four hundred and fifty men," retorted Donal, unmoved.
"Graeme," said Hugh, "you're junior officer here; and I'm commandant. You ought to know I don't have to explain tactics to you. But just to set your mind at rest, Intelligence has given a clear green on enemy activity in the area."
"Still," persisted Donal, "why take unnecessary chances?"
Hugh sighed in exasperation.
"I certainly shouldn't have to give you lessons in stategy," he said bitingly. "I think you abuse the right the code gives you to question Staff decisions. But to put an end to this—there's a good reason why we'll be using the minimum number of men. Our main thrust at the enemy is to come through this area. If we moved forward in strength, the United Orthodox forces would immediately begin to strengthen defenses. But doing it this way, it should appear we're merely moving to take up a natural vacuum along the front. Once we have the town tied down, the Second and Fourth Commands can filter in to reinforce us and we are in position to mount a full-scale attack at the plains below. Does that answer you?"
"Only partially," said Donal. "I—"
"Give me patience!" snapped the Freilander. "I have five campaigns to my credit, Force-Leader. I'd hardly stick my own neck in a noose. But I'll be taking over White's Force and leaving him in command back here in the Area. You, I and Skuak will make the assay. Now, are you" satisfied?"
There was, of course, no reply to be made to that. Donal bowed his Head in submission and the meeting broke up. Walking back to his Force area, however, alongside Skuak, Donal remained unreconstructed enough to put an extra question to the Cassidan.
"Do you think I'm starting at shadows?" asked Donal.
"Huh!" grunted Skuak. "It's his responsibility. He ought to know what he's doing." And, on that note, they parted; each to marshal his own men.
Back in his own Force area, Donal found that his Groupmen had already assembled his command. They stood under arms, drawn up in three hues of fifty men each, with a senior and junior Groupman at the head of each line. The ranking senior Groupman, a tall, thin Cetan veteran named Morphy, accompanied him as he made his rounds of the ranks, inspecting the men.
They were a good unit, Donal thought, as he paced down between the rows. Well-trained men, battle-seasoned, although in no sense elite troops, since they had been picked at random by the Elders of the First Dissident Church—William having stipulated only his choice of officers for the demonstration Battle Unit. Each man carried a handgun and knife in addition to his regular armament; but they were infantry, spring-rifle men. Weapon for weapon, any thug in the back alley of a large city had more, and more modern firepower; but the trick with modern warfare was not to outgun the enemy, but carry weapons he could not gimmick. Chemical and radiation armament was too easily put out of action from a distance. Therefore, the spring-rifle with its five thousand-sliver magazine and its tiny, compact, non-metaUic mechanism which could put a sliver in a man-sized target at a thousand meters time after time with unvarying accuracy.
Yet, thought Donal, pacing between the silent men in the faint darkness of pre-dawn, even the spring-rifle would be gimmickable one of these days. Eventually, the infantryman would be back to the knife and short sword. And the emphasis would weigh yet again more heavily on the skill of the individual soldier. For sooner or later, no matter what fantastic long-range weapons you mounted, the ground itself had to be taken—and for that there had never been anything but the man in the ranks.
Donal finished his inspection and went back to stand in front of them.
"Rest, men," he said. "But hold your ranks. All Groupmen over here with me."
He walked off out of earshot of the men in ranks and the Groupmen followed him. They squatted in a circle and he passed on to them the orders of the Staff he had just received from Hugh, handing out maps to each of them.
"Any questions?" he asked, as Hugh had asked his Force-Leaders.
There were none. They waited for him to go on. He, in turn looked slowly around the circle, assessing these men on whom his command would depend.
He had had a chance to get to know them in the three weeks previous to this early morning. The six who faced him represented, in miniature, the varying reactions his appointment as Force-Leader had produced in the Force as a whole. Of the hundred and fifty men under him, a few were doubtful of him because of his youth and lack of battle experience. A larger number were unequivocably glad to have him over them because of the Dorsai reputation. A few, a very few, were of that class of men who bristle automatically, as man to man, whenever they find themselves in contact with another individual who is touted as better than they. The instinctive giant- killers. Of this type was the Senior Groupman of the Third Group, an ex-Coby miner named Lee. Even squatting now in this circle, on the brink of action, he met Donal's eye with a faint air of challenge, his brush of dark hair stiffly upright in the gloom, his bony jaw set. Such men were troublemakers unless they had responsibility to hold them down. Donal revised his original intention to travel, himself, with the Third Group.
"We'll split up into patrol-sized units of twenty-five men each," he said. "There'll be a Senior or Junior Groupman to each unit. You'll move separately as units, and if you encounter an enemy patrol, you'll fight as a unit. I don't want any unit going to the rescue of another. Is that clear?"
They nodded. It was clear.
"Morphy," said Donal, turning to the thin Senior Groupman. "I want you to go with the Junior unit of Lee's Group, which will have the rearguard position. Lee will take his own half-group directly in front of you. Chassen"—he looked at the Senior Groupman of the Second Group—"you and Zolta will take positions third and fourth from the rear. I want you personally in fourth position. Suki, as Junior of the First Group, you'll be ahead of Chassen and right behind me. I'll take the upper half of the First Group in advance position."
"Force," said Lee. "How about communications?"
"Hand-signal. Voice. And that's all. And I don't want any of you closing up to make communication easier. Twenty-meter miminum interval between units." Donal looked around the circle again. "Our job here is to penetrate to me little town as quickly and quietly as we can. Fight only if you're forced into it; and break away as quickly as you can."
"The word is it's supposed to be a Sunday walk," commented Lee.
"I don't operate by back-camp rumor," said Donal flatly, his eyes seeking out the ex-miner. "We'll take all precautions. You Groupmen will be responsible for seeing that your men are fully equipped with everything, including medication."
Lee yawned. It was not a gesture of insolence— not quite.
"All right," said Donal. "Back to your Groups."
The meeting broke up.
A few minutes later the almost inaudible peep of a whistle was carried from Force to Force; and they began to move out. Dawn was not yet in the sky, but the low overcast above the treetops was beginning to tighten at their backs.
The first twelve hundred meters through the woods, though they covered it cautiously enough, turned out to be just what Lee had called it—a Sunday walk. It was when Donal, in the lead with the first half-Group, came out on the edge of the river that things began to tighten up.
"Scouts out!" he said. Two of the men from the Group sloshed into the smoothly flowing water, and, rifles held high, waded across its gray expanse to the far side. The glint of their rifles, waved in a circle, signaled the all clear and Donal led the rest of the men into the water and across.
Arrived on the far side, he threw out scouts in three directions—ahead, and along the bank each way—and waited until Suki and his men appeared on the far side of the river. Then, his scouts having returned with no sight of the enemy, Donal spread his men out in light skirmish order and went forward.
The day was growing rapidly. They proceeded by fifty meter jumps, sending the scouts out ahead, then moving the rest of the men up when the signal came back that the ground was clear ahead. Jump succeeded jump and there was no contact with the enemy. A little over an hour later, with the large orange disk of E. Eridani standing clear of the horizon, Donal looked out through a screen of bushes at a small, battle-torn village that was silent as the grave.
Forty minutes later, the three Forces of the Third Command, Battle Unit 176 were united and dug in about the small town of Faith Will Succour. They had uncovered no local inhabitants.
They had had no encounter with the enemy.
FORCE-LEADER II
The mime of Force-Leader Graeme was mud.
The Third Command, or at least that portion of it that was dug in around the village, made no great attempt to hide the fact from him. If he had shown at all mat he was sensitive to their opinion of him, they would have made even less. But there was something about his complete indifference to their attitude that put a check to their obvious contempt. Nevertheless, the hundred and fifty men that had been forced by him to make their approach on the village under full equipment and maximum security effort, and the three hundred other men who had made a much more casual and easy approach, and were congratulating themselves on being out from under such an officer, agreed in an opinion of Donal that had reached its nadir! There is only one thing that veterans hate
63B worse than being made to sweat unnecessarily in garrison; and that is being made to sweat unnecessarily in the field. The word had gone out that the day's work was to be a Sunday walk. And it had been a Sunday walk, except for those serving under a green young Dorsai officer, name of Graeme. The men were not happy.
Along about twilight, as the sunset was fading through the bushy-limbed trees that were the local mutant variform of the Earthly conifer that had been imported when this planet was terraformed, a runner came from Hugh at Command HQ, just outside the enemy end of the village. He found Donal seated astride a fallen log, studying a map of the local area.
"Signal from Battles," said the runner, squatting beside the log.
"Stand up," said Donal, quietly. The runner stood. "Now, what's the signal?"
"Second and Third Commands won't be moving up until tomorrow morning," said the runner, sulkily.
"Signal acknowledged," said Donal, waving him off. The runner turned and hurried away with another instance of the new officer's wax-and-braid to relate to the other enlisted men back at HQ.
Left to himself, Donal continued to study the map as long as the light lasted. When it was completely gone, he put the map away, produced a small black whistle from his pocket and peeped for his ranking Senior Groupman.
A moment later a thin body loomed up against the faintly discernible sky beyond the treetops.
"Morphy, sir. Reporting," came a voice of the Senior Groupman.
"Yes—" said Donal. "Sentries all posted, Groupman?"
"Yes, sir." The quality of Morphy's tone was completely without inflection.
"Good. I want them alert at all times. Now, Morphy—"
"Yes, sir?"
"Who do we have in the Force that has a good sense of smell?"
"Smell, sir?"
Donal merely waited.
"Well, sir," said Morphy, finally and slowly. "There's Lee, he practically grew up in the mines, where you have to have a good sense of smell. That's the mines on Coby, Force-Leader."
"I assumed those were the mines you meant," said Donal, dryly. "Get Lee over here, will you?"
Morphy took out his own whistle and blew for the Senior Groupman, Third Group. They waited.
"He's about the camp isn't he?" said Donal, after a moment. "I want all the men within whistle sound that aren't on sentry duty."
"Yes, sir," said Morphy. "He'll be here in a moment. He knows it's me. Everybody sounds a little different on these whistles and you get to know them like voices after a while, sir."
"Groupman," said Donal. "I'd be obliged if you didn't feel the need to keep telling me things I already know."
"Yes, sir," said Morphy, subsiding.
Another shadow loomed up out of the darkness.
"What is it, Morphy?" said the voice of Lee.
"I wanted to see you," spoke up Donal, before the Senior Groupman had a chance to answer. "Morphy tells me you have a good sense of smell."
"I do pretty well," said Lee.
"Sir!"
"I do pretty well, sir."
"AH right," said Donal. "Both of you take a look at the map here. Look sharp. I'm going to make a light," He flicked on a little flash, shielded by his hand. The map was revealed, spread out on the log before them. "Look here," said Donal, pointing. "Three kilometers off this way. Do you know what that is?"
"Small valley," said Morphy. "It's way outside our sentry posts."
"We're going there," Donal said. The light went out and he got up from the log.
"Us? Us, sir?" the voice of Lee came at him.
"The three of us," said Donal. "Come along." And he led the way surefootedly out into the darkness.
Going through the woods, he was pleased to discover the two Groupmen were almost as sure-footed in the blackness as himself. They went slowly but carefully for something over a mile; and then they felt the ground beginning to slope upward under their feet. "All right. Down and easy," said Donal quietly. The three men dropped to their bellies and began in skilled silence to work their way up to the crest of the slope. It took them a good half-hour; but at the end of that time they lay side by side just under the skyline of a ridge, looking over into a well of blackness that was a small, hidden valley below. Donal tapped Lee on the shoulder and when the other turned his face toward him in the gloom, Donal touched his own nose, pointed down into the valley and made sniffing motions. Lee turned his face back to the valley and lay in that position for several minutes, apparently doing nothing at all. However, at the end of that time, he turned toward Donal again, and nodded. Donal motioned them all back down the slope.
Donal asked no questions and the two Groupmen volunteered nothing until they were once more back safely within the lines of their own sentry posts. Then Donal turned toward Lee.
"Well, Groupman," he said. "What did you smell?"
Lee hesitated. His voice, when he answered, had a note of puzzlement in it.
"I don't know, sir," he answered. "Something— sour, sort of. I could just barely smell it."
"That's the best you can do?" inquired Donal. "Something sour?"
"I don't know, sir," said Lee. "I've got a pretty good nose, Force—in fact," a note of belligerence crept into his voice. "I've got a damned good nose. I never smelled anything like this before. I'd remember."
"Have either of you men ever contracted on this planet before?"
"No," said Lee.
"No, sir," answered Morphy.
"I see," said Donal. They had reached the same log from which they had started a little less than three hours before. "Well, that'll be all. Thank you, Groupmen."
He sat down on the log again. The other two hesitated a moment; and then went off together.
Left alone, Donal consulted the map again; and sat thinking for a while. Then he rose, and hunting up Morphy, told him to take over the Force, and stay awake. Donal himself was going to Command HQ. Then he took off.
Command HQ was a blackout shell containing a sleepy orderly, a map viewer and Skuak.
"The commandant around?" asked Donal, as he came in.
"Been asleep three hours," said Skuak. "What're you doing up? I wouldn't be if I didn't have the duty."
"Where's he sleeping?"
"About ten meters off in the bush, at eleven o'clock," said Skuak. "What's it all about? You aren't going to wake him, are you?'
"Maybe he'll still be awake," said Donal; and went out.
Outside the shell, and the little cleared space of the HQ area, he cat-footed around to the location Skuak had mentioned. A battle hammock was there, slung between two trees, with a form mounding its climate cover. But when Donal reached in to put his hand on the form's shoulder, it closed only on the soft material of a rolled-up battle jacket.
Donal breathed out and turned about. He went back the way he had come, past the Command HQ area, and was stopped by a sentry as he approached the village.
"Sorry, Force," said the sentry. "Commandant's order. No one to go into the village area. Not even himself, he says. Booby traps."
"Oh, yes—thank you, sentry," said Donal; and, turning about, went off into the darkness.
As soon as he was safely out of sight, however, he turned again, and worked his way back past the sentry lines and in among the houses of the village. The small but very bright moon which the Harmonites called The Eye of the Lord was just rising, and throwing, through the ruined walls, alternate patches of tricky silver and black. Slipping in and out of the black places, he began patiently to search the place, house by house, and building by building.
It was a slow and arduous process, carried out the way he was doing it, in complete silence. And the moon mounted in the sky. It was nearly four hours later that he came upon what he was searching for.
In the moonlit center of a small building's roofless shell stood Hugh Killien, looking very tall and efficient in his chameleon battle-dress. And close to him— almost close enough to be in his arms—was Anea, the Select of Kultis. Beyond them both, blurred by action of the polarizer that had undoubtedly been the means of allowing it to carry her invisibly to this spot, was a small flying platform.
"... Sweet," Hugh was saying, his resonant voice pitched so low it barely carried to the ears of Donal, shrouded in shadow outside the broken wall, "Sweet, you must trust me. Together we can stop him; but you must let me handle it. His power is tremendous—"
"I know, I know!" she interrupted, fiercely, all but wringing her hands. "But every day we wait makes it more dangerous for you, Hugh. Poor Hugh—" gently she raised her hand to touch his cheek, "what I've dragged you into."
"Dragged? Me?" Hugh laughed, low and confidently. "I went into this with my eyes open." He reached out for her. "For you—"
But she slipped away from him.
"Now's not the time for that," she said. "Anyway, it's not me you're doing this for. It's Kultis. He's not going to use me," she said fiercely, "to get my world under his thumb!"
"Of course, it's for Kultis," said Hugh. "But you are Kultis, Anea. You're everything I love about the Exotics. But don't you see; all we have to work on are your suspicions. You think he's planning against the Bond, against Sayona, himself. But that's not enough for us to go to Kultis with."
"But what can I do?" she cried. "I can't use his own methods against him. I can't lie, or cheat, or set agents on him while he still holds my contract. I ... I just can't. That's what being Select means!" She clenched her fists. "I'm trapped by my own mind, my own body." She turned on him suddenly. "You said when I first spoke to you, two months ago you said you had evidence!"
"I was mistaken," Hugh's tone was soothing. "Something came to my attention—at any rate I was wrong. I have my own built-in moral system, too, Anea. It may not reach the level of psychological blockage like yours," he drew himself up, looking very martial in the moonlight. "But I know what's honorable and right."
"Oh, I know. I know, Hugh—" she was all contrition, "But I get so desperate. You don't know—"
"If he had only made some move against you personally—"
"Me?" She stiffened. "He wouldn't dare! A Select of Kultis—and besides," she added with more of a touch of common sense than Donal had heretofore given her credit for possessing, "that'd be foolish. He'd have nothing to gain; and Kultis would be alerted against him."
"I don't know," Hugh scowled in the moonlight. "He's a man like anyone else. If I thought—"
"Oh, Hugh!" she giggled suddenly, like any schoolgirl. "Don't be absolutely ridiculous!"
"Ridiculous!" His tone rang with wounded feelings.
"Oh, now—I didn't mean that. Hugh, now stop looking like an elephant that just had his trunk stung by a bee. There's no point in making things up. He's far too intelligent to—" she giggled again, then sobered. "No, it's his head we have to worry about; not his heart."
"Do you worry about my heart?" he asked in a low voice.
She looked down at the ground.
"Hugh—I do like you," she said. "But you don't understand. A Select is a ... a symbol."
"If you mean you can't—"
"No, no, not that—" she looked up quickly. "I've no block against love, Hugh. But if I was involved in something ... something small, and mean, it's what it would do to those back on Kultis to whom a Select means something—You do understand?"
"I understand that I'm a soldier," he said. "And that I never know whether I'll have a tomorrow or not."
"I know," she said. "And they send you out on things like this, dangerous things."
"My dear little Anea," he said, tenderly. "How little you understand what it is to be a soldier. I volunteered for this job."
"Volunteered?" She stared at him.
"To go look for danger—to go look for opportunities to prove myself!" he said, fiercely. "To make myself a name, so that the stars will believe I'm the kind of man a Select of Kultis could want and belong with!"
"Oh, Hugh!" she cried on a note of enthusiasm. "If you only could! If only something would make you famous. Then we could really fight him!"
He checked, staring at her in the moonlight with such a sandbagged expression that Donal, in the shadows, nearly chuckled.
"Must you always be talking about politics?" he cried.
But Donal had already turned away from the two of them. There was no point in listening further. He moved silently out of earshot; but after that he went quickly, not caring about noise. His search for Hugh had taken him clear across the village, so that what was closest to him now was his own Force area. The short night of Harmony's northern continent was already beginning to gray toward dawn. He headed toward his own men, one of his odd certainties chilling him.
"Halt!" cried one of his own sentries, as Donal broke clear of the houses. "Halt and give—sir!"
"Come with me!" snapped Donal. "Where's the Third Group Area from here?"
"This way, sir," said the man; and led the way, trotting to keep up with Donal's long strides.
They burst into the Third Group area. Donal put his whistle to his lips and blew for Lee.
"What—?" mumbled a sleepy voice from half a dozen meters' distance. A hammock heaved and disgorged the bony figure of the ex-miner. "What the hell ... sir?"
Donal strode up to him and with both hands swung him about so that he faced toward the enemy territory from which me dawn breeze was coming. "Smell!" he ordered.
Lee blinked, scrubbed his nose with one knotty fist, and stifled a yawn. He took a couple of deep breaths filling his lungs, his nostrils spread—and suddenly he snapped into complete awakedness.
"Same thing, sir," he said, turning to Donal. "Stronger."
"All right!" Donal wheeled about on the sentry. "Take a signal to Senior Groupmen, First and Second Groups. Get their men into trees, high up in trees, and get themselves up, too."
'Trees, sir?"
"Get going! I want every man in this Force a dozen meters off the ground in ten minutes—with their weapons!" The sentry turned to make off. "If you've got time after making that signal, try to get through to Command HQ with it. If you see you can't, climb a tree yourself. Got that?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then get going!"
Donal wheeled about and started himself on the business of getting the sleeping Third Group soldiers out of their hammocks and up the trunks of tall trees. It was not done in ten minutes. It was closer to twenty by the time they were all off the ground. A group of Dorsai schoolboys would have made it in a quarter of the time, from the sounder sleep of youth. But on the whole, thought Donal, pulling himself at last up into a tree, they had been in time; and that was what counted.
He did not stop as the others had, at a height of a dozen meters. Automatically, as he hurried the others out of their hammocks, he had marked the tallest tree in the area; and this he continued to climb until he had a view out over the tops of the lesser vegetation of the area. He shaded his eyes against the new-rising sun, peering off toward enemy territory, and between the trees.
"Now, what d'we do?" floated up an aggrieved voice from below and off to one side of his own lofty perch. Donal took his palm from his eyes and tilted his head downward.
"Senior Groupman Lee," he said in a low, but carrying voice. "You will shoot the next man who opens his mouth without being spoken to first by either you, or myself. That is a direct order."
He raised his head again, amid a new silence, and again peered off under his palm through the trees.
The secret of observation is patience. He saw nothing, but he continued to sit, looking at nothing in particular, and everything in general; and after four slow minutes he was rewarded by a slight flicker of movement that registered on his gaze. He made no effort to search it out again, but continued to observe in the same general area; and gradually, as if they were figures developing on a film out of some tangled background, he became aware of men slipping from cover to cover, a host of men, approaching the camp.
He leaned down again through the branches.
"No firing until I blow my whistle," he said, in an even lower voice than before. "Pass the word— quietly."
He heard, like the murmur of wind in those same branches, the order being relayed on to the last man in the Third Group and—he hoped—to the Second and First Groups as well.
The small, chameleon-clad figures continued to advance. Squinting at them through the occulting leaves and limbs, he made out a small black cross sewn to the right shoulder of each battle-dress. These were no mercenaries. These were native elite troops of the United Orthodox Church itself, superb soldiers and wild fanatics both. And even as the recognition confirmed itself in his mind, the advancing men broke into a charge upon the camp, bursting forth all at once in the red-gray dawnlight into full-throated yips and howls, underlaid a second later by the high-pitched singing of their spring-gun slivers as they ripped air and wood and flesh.
They were not yet among the trees where Donal's force was hiding. But his men were mercenaries, and had friends in the camp the Orthodox elite were attacking. He held them as long as he could, and a couple of seconds longer; and then, putting his whistle to lips, he blew with the damper completely off—a blast that echoed from one end of the camp to the other.
Savagely, his own men opened up from the trees. And for several moments wild confusion reigned on the ground. It is not easy to tell all at once from which direction a sliver gun is being fired at you. For perhaps five minutes, the attacking Orthodox soldiers labored under the delusion that the guns cutting them down were concealed in some groundlevel ambush. They killed ruthlessly, everything they could see on their own eye-level; and, by the time they had discovered their mistake, it was too late. On their dwin- died numbers was concentrated the fire of a hundred and fifty-one rifles; and if the marksmanship of only one of these was up to Dorsai standards, that of the rest was adequate to the task. In less than forty minutes from the moment in which Donal had begun to harry his sleep-drugged men up into the trees, the combat was over.
The Third Group slid down out of their trees and one of the first down—a soldier named Kennedy— calmly lifted his rifle to his shoulder and sent a sliver through the throat of an Orthodox that was writhing on the ground, nearby.
"None of that!" cried Donal, sharply and clearly; and his voice carried out over the sea. A mercenary hates wanton killing, it not being his business to slaughter men, but to win battles. But not another shot was fired. The fact said something about a significant change in the attitude of the men of the Third Command toward a certain new officer by the name of Graeme.
Under Donal's orders, the wounded on both sides were collected and those with serious wounds medicated. The attacking soldiery had been wiped out almost to a man. But it had not been completely one-sided. Of the three hundred-odd men who had been on the ground at the time of the attack, all but forty-three—and that included Force-Leader Skuak— were casualties.
"Prepare to retreat," ordered Donal—and, at that
A moment, the man facing him turned his head to look past at something behind Donal. Donal turned about.
Pounding out of the ruined village, hand gun in his fist, was Commandant Killien.
In silence, not moving, the surviving soldiers of the Command watched him race up to him. He checked at their stare; and his eyes swung about to focus on Donal. He dropped to a walk and strode up to within a few meters of the younger officer.
"Well, Force-Leader!" he snapped. "What happened? Report?"
Donal did not answer him directly. He raised his hand and pointed to Hugh; and spoke to two of the enlisted men standing by.
"Soldiers," he said. "Arrest that man. And hold him for immediate trial under Article Four of the Mercenaries Code."
VETERAN
Directly after getting into the city, with his canceled contract stiff in his pocket, and cleaning up in his hotel room, Donal went down two flights to pay his visit to Marshal Hendrik Gait. He found him in, and concluded certain business with him before leaving to pay his second call at a different hotel across the city.
In spite of himself, he felt a certain weakness in the knees as he announced his presence to the doorbot. It was a weakness most men would have excused him. William, Prince of Ceta, was someone few persons would have cared to beard in his own den; and Donal, in spite of what he had just experienced, was still a young—a very young—man. However, the doorbot invited him in, and summoning up his calmest expression, Donal strode into the suite.
William was, as the last time Donal had seen him, busy at his desk. This was no affectation on William's part, as a good many people between the stars could testify. Seldom has one individual accomplished in a single day what William accomplished in the way of business, daily, as a matter of routine. Donal walked up to the desk and nodded his greeting. William looked up at him. "I'm amazed to see you," he said. "Are you, sir?" said Donal. William considered him in silence for perhaps half a minute.
"It's not often I make mistakes," he said. "Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that when I do they turn out to be on the same order of magnitude as my successes. What inhuman kind of armor are you wearing, young man, that leads you to trust yourself in my presence, again?"
"Possibly the armor of public opinion," replied Donal. "I've been in the public eye, recently. I have something of a name, nowadays."
"Yes," said William. "I know that type of armor from personal experience, myself."
"And then," said Donal, "you did send for me." "Yes." And then, without warning, William's face underwent a change to an expression of such savagery as Donal had never seen before. "How dare you!" snarled the older man, viciously. "How dare you!"
"Sir," said Donal, wooden-faced, "I had no alternative."
"No alternative! You come to me and have the effrontery to say—no alternative?"
"Yes, sir," said Donal.
William rose in swift and lithe motion. He stalked around the desk to stand face to face, his eyes up-tilted a Httle to bore into the eyes of this tall young Dorsai.
"I took you on to follow my orders, nothing else!" he said icily. "And you—grandstand hero that you are—wreck everything."
"Sir?"
"Yes—'sir'. You backwoods moron! You imbecile. Who told you to interfere with Hugh Killien? Who told you to take any action about him?"
"Sir," said Donal. "I had no choice."
"No choice? How—no choice?"
"My command was a command of mercenaries," answered Donal, without moving a muscle. "Commandant Killien had given his assurance in accordance with the Mercenaries Code. Not only had his assurance proved false, he himself had neglected his command while in the field and in enemy territory. Indirectly, he had been responsible for the death of over half his men. As ranking field officer present, I had no choice but to arrest him and hold him for trial."
"A trial held on the spot?"
"It is the code, sir," said Donal. He paused. "I regret it was necessary to shoot him. The court-martial left me no alternative."
"Again!" said William. "No alternative! Graeme, the space between the stars does not go to men who can find no alternatives]" He turned about abruptly, walked back around his desk and sat down.
"All right," he said coldly but with all the passion gone, "get out of here." Donal turned and walked toward the door as William picked up a paper from before him. "Leave your address with my doorbot," said William. "I'll find some kind of a post for you on some other world."
"I regret, sir—" said Donal.
William looked up.
"It didn't occur to me that you would have any further need of me. Marshal Gait has already found me another post."
William continued to look at him for a long moment. His eyes were as cold as the eyes of a basilisk.
"I see," he said at last, slowly. "Well, Graeme, perhaps we shall have something to do with each other in the future."
"I'll hope we will," said Donal. He went out. But, even after he had closed the door behind him, he thought he could feel William's eyes still coming at him through all the thickness of its panel.
He had yet one more call to make, before his duty on this world was done. He checked the directory out in the corridor and went down a flight.
The doorbot invited him in; and ArDell Montor, as large and untidy as ever, with his eyes only slightly blurred from drink, met him halfway to the entrance. "You!" said ArDell, when Donal explained what it was he wanted. "She won't see you" He hunched his heavy shoulders, looking at Donal; and for a second his eyes cleared. Something sad and kind looked out of them, to be replaced with bitter humor. "But the old fox won't like it. I'll ask her."
'Tell her it's about something she needs to know," said Donal.
"I'll do that. Wait here," Ardell went out the door.
He returned in some fifteen minutes.
"You're to go up," he said. "Suite 1890." Donal turned toward the door. "I don't suppose," said the Newtonian, almost wistfully, "I'll be seeing you again."
"Why, we may meet," answered Donal.
"Yes," said ArDell. He stared at Donal penetratingly. "We may at that. We may at that."
Donal went out and up to Suite 1890. The doorbot let him in. Anea was waiting for him, slim and rigid in one of her high-collared, long dresses of blue.
"Well?" she said. Donal considered her almost sorrowfully.
"You really hate me, don't you?" he said.
"You killed him!" she blazed.
"Oh, of course." In spite of himself, the exasperation she was always so capable of tapping in him rose to the surface. "I had to—for your own good."
"For my good!"
He reached into his tunic pocket and withdrew a small telltale. But it was unlighted. For a wonder this apartment was unbugged. And then he thought—of course, I keep forgetting who she is.
"Listen to me," he said. "You've been beautifully /equipped by gene selection and training to be a
Select—but not to be anything else. Why can't you understand that interstellar intrigue isn't your dish?"
"Interstellar ... what're you talking about?" she demanded.
"Oh, climb down for a moment," he said wearily— and more youngly man he had said anything since leaving home. "William is your enemy. You understand that much; but you don't understand why or how, although you think you do. And neither do I," he confessed, "although I've got a notion. But the way for you to confound William isn't by playing his game. Play your own. Be the Select of Kultis. As the Select, you're untouchable."
"If," she said, "you've nothing more to say than that—"
"All right," he took a step toward her. "Listen, then. William was making an attempt to compromise you. Killien was his tool—"
"How dare you?" she erupted.
"How dare I?" he echoed wearily. "Is there anyone in this interstellar community of madmen and madwomen who doesn't know that phrase and use it to me on sight? I dare because it's the truth."
"Hugh," she stormed at him, "was a fine, honest man. A soldier and a gentleman! Not a ... a—"
"Mercenary?" he inquired. "But he was."
"He was a career officer," she replied haughtily. "There's a difference."
"No difference." He shook his head. "But you wouldn't understand that. Mercenary isn't necessarily the dirty word somebody taught you it is. Never mind. Hugh Killien was worse than any name you might be mistaken enough to call me. He was a fool."
"Oh!" she whirled about.
He took her by one elbow and turned her around. She came about in shocked surprise. Somehow, it had never occurred to her to imagine how strong he was. Now, the sudden realization of her physical helplessness in his hands shocked her into abrupt and unusual silence.
"Listen to the truth, then," he said. "William dangled you like an expensive prize before Killien's eyes. He fed him full of the foolish hope that he could have you—the Select of Kultis. He made it possible for you to visit Hugh that night at Faith Will Succour—yes," he said, at her gasp, "I know about that. I saw you there with him. He also made sure Hugh would meet you, just as he made sure that the Orthodox soldiers would attack."
"I don't believe it—" she managed.
"Don't you be a fool, too," Donal said, roughly. "How else do you think an overwhelming force of Orthodox elite troops happened to move in on the encampment at just the proper time? What other men than fanatic Orthodox soldiery could be counted on to make sure none of the men in our unit escaped alive? There was supposed to be only one man to escape from that affair—Hugh Killien, who would be in a position then to make a hero's claim on you. You see how much your good opinion is worth?"
"Hugh wouldn't—"
"Hugh didn't," interrupted Donal. "As I said, he was a fool, A fool but a good soldier. Nothing more was needed for William. He knew Hugh would be fool enough to go and meet you, and good soldier enough not to throw his life away when he saw his command was destroyed. As I say, he would have come back alone—and a hero."
"But you saw through this!" she snapped. "What's your secret? A pipeline to the Orthodox camp?"
"Surely it was obvious from the situation; a command exposed, a commandant foolishly making a love-tryst in a battleground, that something like the attack was inevitable. I simply asked myself what kind of troops would be used and how they might be detected. Orthodox troops eat nothing but native herbs, cooked in the native fashion. The odor of their cooking permeates their clothing. Any veteran of a Harmony campaign would be able to recognize their presence the same way."
"If his nose was sensitive enough. If he knew where to look for them—"
"There was only one logical spot—"
"Anyway," she said coldly. "This is beside the point. The point is"—suddenly she fired up before him—"Hugh wasn't guilty. You said it yourself. He was, even according to you, only a fool! And you had him murdered!"
He sighed in weariness.
"The crime," he said, "for which Commandant Killien was executed was that of misleading his men and abandoning them in enemy territory. It was that he paid with his life for."
"Murderer!" she said. "Get out!"
"But," he said, staring baffledly at her, "I've just explained."
"You've explained nothing," she said, coldly, and from a distance. "I've heard nothing but a mountain of lies, lies, about a man whose boots you aren't fit to clean. Now, will you get out, or do I have to call the hotel guard?"
"You don't believe—?" He stared at her, wide-eyed.
"Get out." She turned her back on him. Like a man in a daze, he turned himself and walked blindly to the door and numbly out into the corridor. Still walking, he shook his head, like a person who finds himself in a bad dream and unable to wake up.
What was this curse upon him? She had not been lying—she was not capable of doing so successfully. She had really heard his explanation and—it had meant nothing to her. It was all so obvious, so plain—the machinations of William, the stupidity of Killien. And she had not seen it when Donal pointed it out to her. She, of all people, a Select of Kultis!
Why? Why? Why?
Scourged by the devils of self-doubt and loneliness, Donal moved off down the corridor, back in the direction of Gait's hotel.
AIDE-DE-CAMP
They met in the office of Marshal Gait, in his Freiland home; and the enormous expanse of floor and the high vaulted ceiling dwarfed them as they stood three men around a bare desk.
"Captain Lludrow, this is my Aide, Commandant Donal Graeme," said Gait, brusquely. "Donal, this is Russ Lludrow, Patrol Chief of my Blue Patrol."
"Honored, sir," said Donal, inclining his head.
"Pleased to meet you, Graeme," answered Lludrow. He was a fairly short, compact man in his early forties, very dark of skin and eye.
"You'll trust Donal with all staff information," said Gait. "Now, what's your reconnaissance and intelligence picture?"
"There's no doubt about it, they're planning an expeditionary landing on Oriente." Lludrow turned to- ward the desk and pressed buttons on the map keyboard. The top of the desk cleared to transparency and they looked through at a non-scale map of the Sir-ian system. "Here we are," he said, stabbing his finger at roe world of Freiland, "here's New Earth"—his finger moved to Freiland's sister planet—"and here's Oriente"—his finger skipped to a smaller world inward toward me sun—"in the positions they'll be in, relative to one another twelve days from now. You see, we'll have the sun between the two of us and also almost between each of our worlds and Oriente. They couldn't have picked a more favorable tactical position."
Gait grunted, examining the map. Donal was watching Lludrow with quiet curiosity. The man's accent betrayed him for a New Earthman, but here he was high up on the Staff of Freiland's fighting forces. Of course, the two Sirian worlds were natural allies, being on the same side as Old Earth against the Venus-Newton-Cassida group; but simply because they were so close, there was a natural rivalry in some things, and a career officer from one of them usually did best on his home world.
"Don't like it," said Gait, finally. "It's a fool stunt from what I can see. The men they land will have to wear respirators; and what the devil do they expect to do with their beachhead when they establish it? Oriente's too close to the sun for terraforming, or we would have done it from here long ago."
"It's possible," said Lludrow, calmly, "they could intend to mount an offensive from there against our two planets here."
"No, no," Gait's voice was harsh and almost irritable. His heavy face loomed above the map. "That's as wild a notion as ierraforming Orients. They couldn't keep a base there supplied, let alone using it to attack two large planets with fully established population and industry. Besides, you don't conquer civilized worlds. That's a maxim."
"Maxims can become worn out, though," put in Donal.
"What?" demanded Gait, looking up. "Oh— Donal. Don't interrupt us now. From the looks of it," he went on to Lludrow, "it strikes me as nothing so much as a live exercise—you know what I mean."
Lludrow nodded—as did Donal unconsciously. Live exercises were something that no planetary Chief of Staff admitted to, but every military man recognized. They were actual small battles provoked with a handy enemy either for the purpose of putting a final edge on troops in training, or to keep that edge on troops that had been too long on a standby basis. Gait, almost alone among me Planetary Commanders of his time, was firmly set against mis action, not only in theory, but in practice. He believed it more honest to hire his troops out, as in the recent situation on Harmony, when they showed signs of going stale. Donal privately agreed with him; although mere was always the danger that when you hired troops out, they lost the sense of belonging to you, in particular, and were sometimes spoiled through mismanagement.
"What do you think?" Gait was asking his Patrol chief.
"I don't know, sir," Lludrow answered. "It seems the only sensible interpretation."
"The thing," interrupted Donal, again, "would be to go over some of the nonsensible interpretations as well, to see if one of them doesn't constitute a possible danger. And from that—"
"Donal," broke in Gait, dryly, "you are my aide, not my Battle Op."
"Still—" Donal was persisting, when the marshal cut him off in a tone of definite command.
"That will be all!"
"Yes, sir," said Donal, subsiding.
"Then," said Gait, turning back to Lludrow, "we'll regard this as a heaven-sent opportunity to cut an arm or two off the fighting strength of the Newton Cassidan fleet and field force. Go back to your Patrol. I'll send orders."
Lludrow inclined his head and was just about to turn and go when there was an interruption—the faint swish of air from one of the big office doors sliding back, and the tap of feminine heels approaching over the polished floor. They turned to see a tall, dazzlingly beautiful woman with red hair coming at them across the office.
"Elvine!" said Gait.
"Not interrupting anything, am I?" she called, even before she came up to them. "Didn't know you had a visitor."
"Russ," said Gait. "You know my sister-in-law's daughter, The Elvine Rhy? Elvine, this is my Blue Patrol Chief, Russ Lludrow."
"Very deeply honored," said Lludrow, bowing.
"Oh, we've met—or at least I've seen you before." She gave him her hand briefly, then turned to Donai. "Donal, come fishing with me."
"I'm sorry," said Donal. "I'm on duty."
"No, no," Gait waved him off with a large hand. "There's nothing more at the moment. Run along, if you want."
"At your service, then," said Donal.
"But what a cold acceptance!" she turned on Lludrow. "I'm sure the Patrol chief wouldn't have hesitated like that."
Lludrow bowed again.
"I'd never hesitate where the Rhy was concerned."
"There!" she said. "There's your model, Donal. You should practice manners—and speeches like that"
"If you suggest it," said Donal.
"Oh, Donal." She tossed her head. "You're hopeless. But come along, anyway." She turned and left; and he followed her.
They crossed the great central hall and emerged into the garden terrace above the blue-green bay of the shallow, inland sea that touched the edges of Gait's home. He expected her to continue down to the docks, but instead she whirled about in a small arbor, and stood facing him.
"Why do you treat me like this?" she threw at him. "Whyr
'Treat you?" He looked down at her.
"Oh, you wooden man!" Her lips skinned back over her perfect teeth. "What're you afraid of—that I'll eat you up?"
"Wouldn't you?" he asked her quite seriously— and she checked at his answer.
"Come on. Let's go fishing!" she cried, and whirled about and ran down toward the dock.
So, they went fishing. But even slicing through the water in pursuit of a twisting fish at sixty fathoms depth, Donal's mind was not on the sport. He let the small jet unit on his shoulders push him whither the chase led him; and, in the privacy of his helmet, condemned himself darkly for his own ignorance. For it was this crime of ignorance which he abhorred above all else—in this case his ignorance of the ways of women—that had led him to believe he could allow himself the luxury of a casual and friendly acquaintanceship with a woman who wanted him badly, but whom he, himself, did not want at all.
She had been living here, in this household, when Gait had brought him here as a personal aide. She was, by some intricate convolution of Freiland inheritance laws, the marshal's responsibility; in spite of the distance of their relationships and the fact that her own mother and some other relatives were still living. She was some five years older than Donal, although in her wild energy and violence of emotion, this difference was lost. He had found her excitements interesting, at first; and her company a balm to what—though he would not admit it to himself in so many words—was a recently bruised and very tender portion of his ego. That had been at first.
"You know," she had said to him in one of her peculiar flashes of directness. "Anybody would want me."
"Anybody would," he admitted, considering her beauty. It was not until later that he discovered, to his dismay, that he had accepted an invitation he had not even suspected was there.
For four months now, he had been established at the marshal's estate, learning some of the elements of Freilander Staff Control; and learning also, to his increasing dismay, some of the intricacies of a woman's mind. And, in addition to it all, he found himself puzzled as to why he did not want her. Certainly he liked Elvine Rhy. Her company was enjoyable, her attractiveness was undeniable, and a certain brightness and hunger in her personality matched similar traits in his own. Yet, he did not want her. No, not the least bit, not at all.
They gave up their fishing after several hours. Elvine had caught four, averaging a good seven or eight kilograms. He had caught none.
"Elvine—" he began, as he went up the steps of the .terrace with her. But, before he could finish his carefully thought out speech, an annunciator hidden in a rosebush chimed softly.
"Commandant," said the rosebush, gently, "the doorbot announces a Senior Groupman Tage Lee to see you. Do you wish to see him?"
"Lee—" murmured Donal. He raised his voice. "From Coby?"
"He says he is from Coby," answered the rosebush.
"I'll see him," said Donal, striding quickly toward the house. He heard the sound of running feet behind him and Elvine caught at his arm.
"Donal—" she said.
"This'll just take a minute," he answered. "I'll see you in the library in a few minutes."
"All right—" She let go and fell behind him. He went in and to the entrance hall.
Lee, the same Lee who had commanded his Third Group, was waiting for him.
"Well, Groupman," said Donal, shaking hands. "What brings you here?"
"You do, sir," said Lee. He looked Donal in the eye with something of the challenge Donal had marked the first time Donal had seen him. "Could you use a personal orderly?"
Donal considered him.
"Why?"
"I've been carrying my contract around since they let us all go after that business with Killien," said Lee. "If you want to know, I've been on a bat That's my cross. Out of uniform I'm an alcoholic. In uniform, it's better, but sooner or later I get into a hassle with somebody. I've been putting off signing up again because I .couldn't make up my mind what I wanted. Finally, it came to me. I wanted to work for you."
"You look sober enough now," said Donal.
"I can do anything for a few days—even stop drinking. If I'd come up here with the shakes, you'd never have taken me."
Donal nodded.
"I'm not expensive," said Lee. 'Take a look at my contract. If you can't afford me yourself, I'll sign up as a line soldier and you pull strings to get me as-
95B signed to you. I don't drink if I've got something to do; and I can make myself useful. Look here—"
He extended his hand in a friendly manner, as if to shake hands again, and suddenly there was a knife in it.
"That's a back-alley, hired killer trick," said Donal. "Do you think it'd work with me?"
"With you—no." Lee made the knife vanish again. "That's why I want to work for you. I'm a funny character, commandant. I need something to hang to. I need it the way ordinary people need food and drink and home and friends. It's all there in the psychological index number on my contract, if you want to copy it down and check on me."
"I'll take your word for it, for now," said Donal, "What is wrong with you?"
"I'm borderline psycho," Lee answered, his lean face expressionless. "Not correctable. I was born with a deficiency. What they tell me is, I've got no sense of right or wrong; and I can't manage just by abstract rules. The way the doctors put it when I first got my contract, I need my own, personal, living god in front of me all the time. You take me on and tell me to cut the throat of all the kids under five I meet, and that's fine. Tell me to cut my own throat—the same thing. Everything's all right, then."
"You don't make yourself sound very attractive."
"I'm telling you the truth. I can't tell you anything else. I'm like a bayonet that's been going around all my life looking for a rifle to fit on to; and now I've found it. So, don't trust me. Take me on probation for five years, ten years—the rest of my life. But don't shut me out." Lee half-turned and pointed one bony finger at the door behind him. "Out there is hell for me, commandant. Anything inside here is heaven."
"I don't know," said Donal, slowly. "I don't know that I'd want the responsibility."
"No responsibility." Lee's eyes were shining; and it struck home to Donal suddenly that the man was terrified: terrified of being refused. "Just tell me. Try me, now. Tell me to get down and bark like a dog. TeU me to cut my left hand off at the wrist. As soon as they've grown me a new one I'll be back to do whatever you want me to do." The knife was suddenly back in his hand. "Want to see?'
"Put that away!" snapped Donal. The knife disappeared. "All right, I'll buy your contract personally. My suit of rooms are third door to the right, the head of the stairs. Go up there and wait for me."
Lee nodded. He offered no word of thanks. He only turned and went.
Donal shook himself mentally as if the emotional charge that had crackled in the air about him the last few seconds was a thing of physical mass draped heavily upon his shoulders. He turned and went to the library.
Elvine was standing looking out the great expanse of open wall at the ocean, as he came in. She turned quickly, at the sound of his steps and came to meet him.
"What was it?" she asked.
"One of my soldiers from the Harmony business," he said. "I've taken him on as my personal orderly." He looked down at her. "Ev—"
Instantly, she drew a little away from him. She looked out the wall, one hand tailing down to play with a silver half-statuette that sat on a low table beside her.
"Yes?" she said.
He found it very hard to get the words out.
"Ev, you know I've been around here a long time," he said.
"A long time?" At that, she turned to face him with a slight look of startlement. "Four months? It seems like hours, only."
"Perhaps," he said, doggedly. "But it has been a long time. So perhaps it's just as well I'm leaving."
"Leaving?" Her eyes shot wide; hazel eyes, staring at him. "Who said you were leaving?"
"I have to, of course," he said. "But I thought I ought to clear something up before I go. I've liked you a great deal, Ev—"
But she was too quick for him.
"Liked me?" she cried. "I should think you should! Why, I haven't hardly had a minute to myself for entertaining you. I swear I hardly know what it looks like any more outside of this place! Liked me! You certainly ought to like me after the way I've put myself out for you!"
He gazed at her furious features for a long moment and then he smiled ruefully.
"You're quite right," he said Tve put you to a great deal of trouble. Pardon me for being so dense as not to notice it" He bent his head to her. 'Til be going now."
He turned and walked away. But he had hardly taken a dozen steps across the sunlit library before she called his name.
"Donal!"
He turned and saw her staring after him, her face stiff, her fists clenched at her side.
"Donal, you ... you can't go," she said, tightly.
"I beg your pardon?" He stared at her.
"You can't go," she repeated. "Your duty is here. You're assigned here."
"No." He shook his head. "You don't understand, Ev. This business of Oriente's come up. Fm going to ask the marshal to assign me to one of the ships."
"You can't." Her voice was brittle. "He isn't here. He's gone down to the Spaceyard."
"Well, then, I'll go there and ask him."
"You can't. I've already asked him to leave you here. He promised."
"You whatT The words exploded from his lips in a tone more suited to the field man to this quiet mansion.
"I asked him to leave you here."
He turned and stalked away from her.
"Donal!" He heard her voice crying despairingly after him, but there was nothing she, or anyone in that house could have done, to stop him then.
He found Gait examining the new experimental model of a two-man anti-personnel craft. The older man looked up in surprise as Donal came up.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Could I see you alone for a minute, sir?" said Donal. "A private and urgent matter."
Gait shot him a keen glance, but motioned aside with his head and they stepped over into the privacy of a tool control boom.
"What is it?" asked Gait.
"Sir," said Donal. "I understand Elvine asked you if I couldn't continue to be assigned to your household during the upcoming business we talked about with Patrol Chief Lludrow earlier today."
"That's right. She did."
"I did not know of it," said Donal, meeting the older man's eyes. "It was not my wish."
"Not your wish?"
"No, sir."
"Oh," said Gait. He drew a long breath and rubbed his chin with one thick hand. Turning his head aside, he gazed out through the screen of the control booth at the experimental ship. "I see," he said. "I didn't realize."
"No reason why you should," Donal felt a sudden twist of emotion inside him at the expression on the older man's face. "I should have spoken to you before sir."
"No, no," Gait brushed the matter aside with a wave of his hand. 'The responsibility's mine. I've never had children. No experience. She has to get herself settled in life one of these days; and ... well, I have a high opinion of you, Donal."
"You've been too kind to me already, sir," Donal said miserably.
"No, no ... well, mistakes will happen. I'll see you have a place with the combat forces right away, of course."
"Thank you," said Donal.
"Don't thank me, boy." Abruptly, Gait looked old. "I should have remembered. You're a Dorsai."
STAFF LIAISON
"Welcome aboard," said a pleasant-faced Junior Captain, as Donal strode through the gas barrier of the inner lock. The Junior Captain was in his early twenties, a black-haired, square-faced young man who looked as if he had gone in much for athletics. "I'm J.C. Allmin Clay Andresen."
"Donal Graeme." They saluted each other. Then they shook hands.
"Had any ship experience?" asked Andresen.
"Eighteen months of summer training cruises in the Dorsai," answered Donal. "Command and armament—no technical posts."
"Command and armament," said Andresen, "are plenty good enough on a Class 4J ship. Particularly Command. You'll be senior officer after me—if anything happens." He made the little ritual gesture, reaching out to touch a close, white, carbon-plastic wall beside him. "Not that I'm suggesting you take over in such a case. My First can handle things all right. But you may be able to give him a hand, if it should happen."
"Be honored," said Donal, "Care to look over the ship?" "I'm looking forward to it." "Right. Step into the lounge, then." Andresen led the way across the small reception room, and through a sliding bulkhead to a corridor that curved off ahead of them to right and left. They went through another door in the wail of the corridor directly in front of them, down a small passage, and emerged through a final door into a large, pleasantly decorated, circular room.
"Lounge," said Andresen. "Control center's right under our feet; reversed gravity." He pressed a stud on the wall and a section of the floor slid back. "You'll have to flip," he warned, and did a head-first dive into the hole.
Donal, who knew what to expect, followed the J.C.'s example. The momentum of his dive shot him through and into another circular chamber of the same size as the lounge, in which everything would have been upside down and nailed to the ceiling, except for the small fact that here the gravity was reversed; and what had been down, was up, and up was down instead.
"Here," said Andresen, as Donal landed lightly on the floor at one side of the opening, "is our Control Eye. As you probably saw when you were moving in to come aboard, the Class 4J is a ball-and-hammer ship." He pressed several studs and in the large globe floating in the center of the floor, that which he had referred to as the Control Eye, a view formed of their craft, as seen from some little distance outside the ship. Half-framed against the star-pricked backdrop of space, and with just a sliver of the curved edge of Freiland showing at the edge of the scene, she floated. A sphere thirty meters in diameter, connected by two slim shafts a hundred meters each in length to a rhomboid-shape that was the ship's thrust unit, some five meters in diameter at its thickest and looking like a large child's spinning top, pivoted on two wires mat clamped it at the middle. This was the "hammer." The ship, proper, was the "ball."
"No phase-shift equipment?" asked Donal. He was thinking of the traditional cylinder shape of the big ships that moved between the stars.
"Don't fool yourself," answered Andresen. "The grid's there. We just hope the enemy doesn't see it, or doesn't hit it. We can't protect it, so we try to make it invisible." His finger stabbed out to indicate the apparently bare shafts. "There's a covering grid running the full length of the ship, from thrust to nose. Painted black."
Donal nodded thoughtfully.
'Too bad a polarizer won't work in the absence of atmosphere," he said.
"You can say that," agreed Andresen. He flicked off the Eye. "Let's look around the rest of the ship by hand."
He led out a door and down a passage similar to the one by which they had entered the lounge. They came out into a corridor that was the duplicate of the curving one they had passed in the other half of the ship.
"Crew's quarters, mess hall, on the other one," explained Andresen. "Officer's quarters, storage and suppliers, repair section, on this one." He pushed open a door in the corridor wall opposite them and they stepped into a section roughly the size of a small hotel room, bounded on its farther side by the curving outer shell of the ship, proper. The shell in this section was, at the moment, on transparent; and the complicated "dentist's chair" facing the bank of controls at the foot of the transparency was occupied; although the figure in it was dressed in coveralls only.
"My First," said Andresen. The figure looked up over the headrest of the chair. It was a woman in her early forties.
"Hi, All," she said. "Just checking the override." Andresen made a wry grimace at Donal.
"Antipersonnel weapons," he explained. "Nobody likes to shoot the poor helpless characters out of the sky as they fall in for an assault—so it's an officer's job. I usually take it over myself if I'm not tied up with something else at the moment. Staff Liaison Donal Graeme—First Officer Coa Benn."
Donal and she shook hands.
"Well, shall we get on?" asked Andresen. They toured the rest of the ship and ended up before the door of Donal's stateroom in Officer's Country.
"Sorry," said Andresen. "But we're short of bunk space. Full complement under battle conditions. So we had to put your orderly in with you. If you've no objection—"
"Not at all," said Donal.
"Good," Andresen looked relieved. "That's why I like the Dorsai. They're so sensible." He clapped Donal on the shoulder, and went hurriedly off back to his duties of getting his ship and crew ready for action.
Entering his stateroom, Donal found Lee had already set up both their gear, including a harness hammock for himself to supplement the single bunk that would be Donal's.
"All set?" asked Donal.
"All set," answered Lee. He still chronically forgot the "sir"; but Donal, having already had some experience with the fanatic literal-mindedness with which the man carried out any command given him, had refrained from making an issue of it. "You settle my contract, yet?"
"I haven't had time," said Donal. "It can't be done in a day. You knew that, didn't you?"
"No," said Lee. "All I ever did was hand it over. And then, later on when I was through my term of service they gave it back to me; and the money I had coming."
"Well, it usually takes a number of weeks or months," Donal said. He explained what it had never occurred to him that anyone should fail to know, that the contracts are owned entirely by the individual's home community or world, and that a contract agreement was a matter for settlement between the employer and the employee's home government. The object was not to provide the individual so much with a job and a living wage, as to provide the home government with favorable monetary and "contractual" balances which would enable them to hire, in their turn, the trained specialists they needed. In the case of Lee's contract, since Donal was a private employer and had money to offer, but no contractual credits, the matter of Lee's employment had to be cleared with the Dorsai authorities, as well as the authorities on Coby, where Lee came from.
"That's more of a formality than anything else, though," Donal assured him. "I'm allowed an orderly, since I've been commandant rank. And the intent to hire's been registered. That means your home government won't draft you for any special service some place else."
Lee nodded, which was almost his utmost expression of relief.
"... Signal!" chimed the annunciator in the stateroom wall by the door, suddenly. "Signal for Staff Liaison Graeme. Report to Flagship, immediately. Staff Liaison Graeme report to Flagship immediately."
Donal cautioned Lee to keep from under the feet of the ship's regular crew; and left.
The Flagship of the Battle made up by the Red and Green Patrols of the Freilander Space Force was, like the Class 4J Donal had just left, already in temporary loose orbit around Oriente. It took him some forty minutes to reach her; and when he entered her lock reception room and gave his name and rank, he was assigned a guide who took him to a briefing room in the ship's interior.
The room was filled by some twenty-odd other Staff Liaisons.
They ranged in rank from Warrant Couriers to a Sub-Patrol Chief in his fifties. They were already seated facing a platform; and, as Donal entered—he was, apparently, the last to arrive—a Senior Captain of flag rank entered, followed closely by Blue Patrol Chief Lludrow.
"All right, gentlemen," said the Senior Captain; and the room came to order. "Here's the situation." He waved a hand and the wall behind him dissolved to reveal an artist's extrapolation of the coming bat-tie. Oriente floated in black space, surrounded by a number of ships in various patterns. The size of the ships had been grossly exaggerated in order to make them visible in comparison with the planet which was roughly two-thirds the diameter of Mars. The largest of these, the Patrol Class—long cylindrical interstellar warships—were in varying orbit eighty to five hundred kilometers above the planet's surface, so that the integration of their pattern enclosed Oriente in web of shifting movement. A cloud of smaller craft, C4Js, A (subclass) 9s, courier ships, firing platforms, and individual and two-man gnat class boats, held position out beyond and planetward of them, right down into the atmosphere.
"We think," said the Senior Captain, "that the enemy, at effective speed and already braking, will come into phase about here—" a cloud of assault ships winked into existence abruptly, a half million kilometers sunward of Oriente, and in the sun's eye. They fell rapidly toward the planet, swelling visibly in size. As they approached, they swung into a circular landing orbit about the planet. The smaller craft closed in, and the two fleets came together in a myriad of patterns whose individual motions the eye could not follow all at once. Then the attacking fleet emerged below the mass of the defenders, spewing a sudden cloud of tiny objects that were the assault troops. These drifted down, attacked by the smaller craft, while the majority of the assault ships from Newton and Cassida began to disappear like blown-out candles as they sought safety in a phase shift that would place them light-years from the scene of battle. To Donal's fine-trained professional mind it was both beautifully thrilling—and completely false. No battle since time began had ever gone off with such ballet grace and balance and none ever would. This was only an imaginative guess at how the battle would take place, and it had no place in it for the inevitable issuance of wrong orders, the individual hesitations, the underestimation of an opponent, the navigational errors that resulted in collisions, or firing upon a sister ship. These all remained for the actual event, like harpies roosting upon the yet-unblasted limbs of a tree, as dawn steals like some gray thief onto the field where men are going to fight. In the coming action off Oriente there would be good ac-
^ tions and bad, wise decisions, and stupid ones—and none of them would matter. Only their total at the end of the day.
"... Well, gentlemen," the Senior Captain was saying, "there you have it as Staff sees it. Your job— yours personally, as Staff Liaisons—is to observe. We want to know anything you can see, anything you can discover, anything you can, or think you can, deduce. And of course"—he hesitated, with a wry smile—"there's nothing we'd appreciate quite so much as a prisoner."
There was a ripple of general laughter at this, as all men there knew the fantastic odds against being able to scoop up a man from an already broken-open enemy ship under the velocities and other conditions of a space battle—and find him still alive, even if you succeeded.
"That's all," said the Senior Captain. The Staff Liaisons rose and began to crowd out the door.
"Just a minute, Graeme!"
Donal turned. The voice was the voice of Lludrow. The Patrol Chief had come down from the platform and was approaching him. Donal turned back to meet him.
"I'd like to speak to you for a moment," said Lludrow. "Wait until the others are out of the room." They stood together in silence until the last of the Staff Liaisons had left, and the Senior Captain had disappeared.
"Yes, sir?" said Donal.
"I'm interested in something you said—or maybe were about to say the other day—when I met you at Marshal Gait's in the process of assessing this Oriente business. You said something that seemed to imply doubt about the conclusions we came to. But I never did hear what it was you had in mind. Care to tell me now?"
"Why, nothing, sir," said Donal. "Staff and the marshal undoubtedly know what they're doing."
"It isn't possible, then, you saw something in the situation that we didn't?" Donal hesitated.
"No, sir. I don't know any more about enemy intentions and plans than the rest of you. Only—" Donal looked down into the dark face below his, wavering on the verge of speaking his mind. Since the affair with Anea he had been careful to keep his flights of mental perception to himself. "Possibly I'm just suspicious, sir."
"So are all of us, man!" said Lludrow, with a hint of impatience. "What about it? In our shoes what would you be doing?"
"In your shoes," said Donal, throwing discretion to the winds, "I'd attack Newton,"
Lludrow's jaw fell. He stared at Donal.
"By heaven," he said, after a moment. "You're not shy about expedients, are you? Don't you know a civilized world can't be conquered?'
Donal allowed himself the luxury of a small sigh. He made an effort to explain himself, once again, in terms others could understand.
"I remember the marshal saying that," he said. "I'm not so sanguine, myself. In fact, mat's a particular maxim I'd like to try to disprove some day.
However—that's not what I meant. I didn't mean to suggest we attempt to take Newton; but mat we attack it. I suspect the Newtonians are as maxim-ridden as ourselves. Seeing us try the impossible, they're very like to conclude we've suddenly discovered some way to make it possible. From their reactions to such a conclusion we might learn a lot—including about the Oriente affair."
Lludrow's look of amazement was tightening into a frown.
"Any force attacking Newton would suffer fantastic losses," he began.
"Only if they intended to carry the attack through," interrupted Donal, eagerly. "It could be a feint—nothing more man that. The point wouldn't be to do real damage, but to upset the thinking of the enemy strategy by introducing an unexpected factor."
"Still," said Lludrow, "to make their feint effective, the attacking force would have to run the risk of being wiped out."
"Give me a dozen ships—" Donal was beginning; when Lludrow started and blinked like a man waking up from a dream.
"Give you—" he said; and smiled. "No, no, commandant, we were speaking theoretically. Staff would never agree £o such a wild, unplanned gamble; and I've no authority to order it on my own. And if I did—how could I justify giving command of such a force to a young man with only field experience, who's never held command in a ship in his life?" He shook his head. "No, Graeme—but I will admit your idea's interesting. And I wish one of us at least had thought of it."
"Would it hurt to mention it—"
"It wouldn't do any good—to argue with a plan Staff has already had in operation for over a week, now." He was smiling broadly. "In fact, my reputation would find itself cut rather severely. But it was a good idea, Graeme. You've got the makings of a strategist. I'll mention the fact in my report to the marshal."
"Thank you, sir," said Donal.
"Back to your ship, then," said Lludrow.
"Good-by, sir."
Donal saluted and left. Behind him, Lludrow frowned for just a moment more over what had just been said—before he turned his mind to other things.
ACTING CAPTAIN
Space battles, mused Donal, are said to be held only by mutual consent. It was one of those maxims he distrusted; and which he had privately determined to disprove whenever he should get the chance. However—as he stood now by the screen of the Control Eye in the main control room of the C4J, watching the enemy ships appearing to swell with the speed of their approach—he was forced to admit that in this instance, it was true. Or true at least to the extent that mutual consent is involved when you attack an enemy point that you know that enemy will defend.
But what if he should not defend it after all? What if he should do the entirely unexpected—
"Contact in sixty seconds. Contact in sixty seconds!" announced the speaker over his head.
"Fasten all," said Andresen, calmly into the talker before him. He sat, with his First and Second Officers duplicating him on either side, in a "dentist's chair" across the room—"seeing" the situation not in actual images as Donal was doing, but from the readings of his instruments. And his knowledge was therefore the more complete one. Cumbersome in his survival battle suit, Donal climbed slowly into the similar chair that had been rigged for him before the Eye, and connected himself to the chair. In case the ship should be broken apart, he and it would remain together as long as possible. With luck, the two of them would be able to make it to a survival ship in orbit around Oriente in forty or fifty hours—if none of some dozens of factors intervened.
He had time to settle himself before the Eye before contact was made. In those last few seconds, he glanced around him; finding it a little wonderful in spite of all he knew, that this white and quiet room, undisturbed by the slightest tremor, should be perched on the brink of savage combat and its own quite possible destruction. Then mere was no more time for thinking. Contact with the enemy had been made and he had to keep his eyes on the scene.
Orders had been to harry the enemy, rather than close with him. Estimates had been twenty per cent casualties for the enemy, five per cent for the defending forces. But such figures, without meaning to be, are misleading. To the man in the battle, twenty per cent, or even five per cent casualties do not mean that he will be twenty per cent or five per cent wounded. Nor, in a space battle, does it mean that one man out of five, or one man out of twenty will be a casualty. It means one ship out of five, or one ship out of twenty—and every living soul aboard her; for, in space, one hundred per cent casualties mean ninety-eight per cent dead.
There were three lines of defense. The first were the light craft that were meant to slow down the oncoming ships so that the larger, more ponderous craft, could try to match velocities well enough to get to work with heavy weapons. Then there were the large craft themselves in their present orbits. Lastly, there were the second line of smaller craft that were essentially antipersonnel, as the attackers dropped their space-suited assault troops. Donal in a C4J was in the first line.
There was no warning. There was no full moment of battle. At the last second before contact, the gun crews of the C4J had opened fire. Then—
It was all over.
Donal blinked and opened his eyes, trying to remember what had happened. He was never to remember. The room in which he lay, fastened to his chair, had been split as if by a giant hatchet. Through the badly-lit gap, he could see a portion of an officer's stateroom. A red, self-contained flare was burning somewhere luridly overhead, a signal that the control room was without air. The Control Eye was slightly askew, but still operating. Through the transparency of his helmet, Donal could see the dwindling lights that marked the enemy's departure on toward Oriente. He struggled upright in his chair and turned his head toward the Control panel.
Two were quite dead. Whatever had split the room open had touched them, too. The Second officer was dead, Andresen was undeniably dead. Coa Benn still lived, but from the feeble movements she was making in the chair, she was badly hurt. And there was nothing anyone could do for her now that they were without air and all prisoners in their suits.
Donal's soldier-trained body began to react before his mind had quite caught up to it. He found himself breaking loose the fastenings that connected him to his chair. Unsteadily, he staggered across the room, pushed the lolling head of Andresen out of the way, and thumbed the intership button.
"C4J One-twenty-nine," he said. "C4J One-twenty-nine—" he continued to repeat the cabalistic numbers until the screen before him lit up with a hel-meted face as bloodless as that of the dead man in the chair underneath him.
"KL," said the face. "A-twenty-three?" Which was code for: "Can you still navigate?"
Donal looked over the panel. For a wonder, it had been touched by what had split the room—but barely. Its instruments were all reading.
"A-twenty-nine," he replied affirmatively.
"M-Forty," said the other, and signed off. Donal let the intership button slip from beneath his finger. M-Forty was—Proceed as ordered,
Proceed as ordered, for the C4J One-twenty-nine, the ship Donal was in, meant—get in close to Oriente and pick off as many assault troops as you can.
Donal set about the unhappy business of removing his dead and dying from their control chairs.
Coa, he noted, as he removed her, more gently than the others, seemed dazed and unknowing. There were no broken bones about her, but she appeared to have been pinched, or crushed on one side by just a touch of what had killed the others. Her suit was tight and intact. He thought she might make it, after all.
Seating himself in the captain's chair, he called the gun stations and other crew posts.
"Report," he ordered.
Gun stations One and Five through Eight answered.
"We're going in planetward," he said. "All able men abandon the weapon stations for now and form a working crew to seal ship and pump some air back in here. Those not sealed off, assemble in lounge. Senior surviving crewman to take charge."
There was a slight pause. Then a voice spoke back to him.
"Gun Maintenanceman Ordovya," it said. "I seem to be surviving Senior, sir. Is this the captain?"
"Staff Liaison Graeme, Acting Captain. Your officers are dead. As ranking man here, I've taken command. You have your orders, Maintenanceman."
"Yes, sir." The voice signed off.
Donal set himself about the task of remembering his ship training. He got the C4J underway toward Oriente and checked all instruments. After a while, the flare went out abruptly overhead and a slow, hissing noise registered on his eardrums—at first faintly, then scaling rapidly up in volume and tone to a shriek. His suit lost some of its drum-tightness.
A few moments later, a hand tapped him on his shoulder. He turned around to look at a blond-headed crewman with his helmet tilted back.
"Ship tight, sir," said the crewman. "I'm Ordovya."
Donal loosened his own helmet and flipped it back, inhaling the room air gratefully.
"See to the First Officer," he ordered. "Do we have anything in the way of a medic aboard?"
"No live medic, sir. We're too small to rate one. Freeze unit, though."
"Freeze her, then. And get the men back to their posts. We'll be on top of the action again in another twenty minutes."
Ordovya went off. Donal sat at his controls, taking the C4J in cautiously and with the greatest possible margins of safety. In principle, he knew how to operate the craft he was seated in; but no one knew better than he what a far cry he was from being an experienced pilot and captain. He could handle this craft the way someone who has taken half a dozen riding lessons can handle a horse—that is, he knew what to do, but he did none of it instinctively. Where Andresen had taken in the readings of all his instruments at a glance and reacted immediately, Donal concentrated on the half dozen main telltales and debated with himself before acting.
So it was that they came late to the action on the edges of Oriente's atmosphere; but not so late that the assault troops were already safely down out of range. Donal searched the panel for the override button on the antipersonnel guns and found it.
"Override on the spray guns," he announced into the mike before him. He looked at the instruments, but he saw in his imagination the dark and tumbling space suited bodies of the assault troops, and he thought of the several million tiny slivers of carbon steel that would go sleeting among them at the touch of his ringer. There was a slight pause before answering; and then the voice of Ordovya came back.
"Sir ... if you like, the gunmen say they're used to handling the weapons—"
"Maintenanceman!" snapped Donal. "You heard (he order. Override!"
"Override, sir."
Donal looked at his scope. The computer had his targets in the gunsights. He pressed the button, and held it down.
Two hours later, the C4J, then in standby orbit, was ordered to return to rendezvous and its captain to report to his Sub-Patrol chief. At the same time came a signal for all Staff Liaisons to report to the flagship; and one for Staff Liaison Donal Graeme to report personally to Blue Patrol Chief Lludrow. Considering the three commands, Donal called Ordovya on the ship's phone and directed him to take care of the first errand. He himself, he decided, could take care of the other two, which might—or might not—be connected.
Arriving at the flagship, he explained his situation to the Reception Officer, who made a signal both to the Staff Liaison people and to the Blue Patrol chief.
"You're to go directly to Lludrow," he informed Donal; and assigned him a guide.
Donal found Lludrow in a private office on the flagship that was not much bigger than Donal's stateroom in the C4J.
"Good!" said Lludrow, getting up behind a desk as Donal came in and coming briskly around it. He waited until the guide had left, and then he put a dark hand on Donal's arm.
"How'd your ship come through?" he asked.
"Navigating," said Donal. "There was a direct hit on the control room though. All officers casualties."
"All officers?" Lludrow peered sharply at him. "And you?"
"I took command, of course. There was nothing left, though, but antipersonnel mop-up."
"Doesn't matter," said Lludrow. "You were Acting Captain for part of the action?"
"Yes."
"Fine. That's better than I hoped for. Now," said Lludrow, "tell me something. Do you feel like sticking your neck out?"
"For any cause I can approve of, certainly," answered Donal. He considered the smaller, rather ugly man; and found himself suddenly liking the Blue Patrol chief. Directness like this had been a rare experience for him, since he had left the Dorsai.
"All right. If you agree, we'll both stick our necks out." Lludrow looked at the door of the office, but it was firmly closed. "I'm going to violate top security and enlist you in an action contrary to Staff orders, if you don't mind."
"Top security?" echoed Donal, feeling a sudden coolness at the back of his neck.
"Yes. We've discovered what was behind this Newton-Cassida landing on Oriente ... you know Oriente?"
"I've studied it, of course," said Donal. "At school—and recently when I signed with Freiland. Temperatures up to seventy-eight degrees centigrade, rock, desert, and a sort of native vine and cactus jungle. No large bodies of water worth mentioning and too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
"Right. Well," said Lludrow, "the important point is, it's big enough to hide in. They're down there now and we can't root them out in a hurry—and not at all unless we go down there after them. We thought they were making the landing as a live exercise and we could expect them to run the gauntlet back out in a few days or weeks. We were wrong."
"Wrong?"
"We've discovered their reason for making the landing on Oriente. It wasn't what we thought at all."
'That's fast work," said Donal. "What's it been ... four hours since the landing?"
"They made fast work of it," said Lludrow. "The news is being sat on; but they are firing bursts of a new kind of radiation from projectors that fire once, move, and fire again from some new hiding place—a large number of projectors. And the bursts they fire hit old Sinus himself. We're getting increased sun-" spot activity." He paused and looked keenly at Dona), as if waiting for comment. Donal took his time, considering the situation.
"Weather difficulties?" he said at last.
"That's it!" said Lludrow, energetically, as though Donal had been a star pupil who had just shone again. "Meteorological opinion says it can be serious, the way they're going about it. And we've already heard their price for calling it off. It seems there's a trade commission of theirs on New Earth right now. No official connection—but the Commission's got the word across."
Donal nodded. He was not at all surprised to hear that trade negotiations were going on in normal fashion between worlds who were at the same time actively fighting each other. That was the normal course of existence between the stars. The ebb and flow of trained personnel on a contractual basis was the lifeblood of civilization. A world who tried to go it on its own would be left behind within a matter of years, to wither on the vine—or at last buy the mere necessities of existence at ruinous cost to itself. Competition meant the trading of skilled minds, and that meant contracts, and contracts meant continuing negotiations.
"They want a reciprocal brokerage agreement," Lludrow said.
Donal looked at him sharply. The open market trading of contracts had been abandoned between the worlds for nearly fifty years. It amounted to speculating in human lives. It removed the last shreds of dignity and security from the individual and treated him as so much livestock or hardware to be traded for no
I other reason than the greatest possible gain. The Dorsai, along with the Exotics, Mara and Kultis, had led the fight against it. There was another angle as well. On "tight" worlds such as those of the Venus Group—which included Newton and Cassida—and the Friendlies, the open market became one more tool of the ruling group; while on "loose" worlds like Freiland, it became a spot of vulnerability where foreign credits could take advantage of local situations. "I see," said Donal.
"We've got three choices," Lludrow said. "Give in—accept the agreement. Suffer the weather effects over a period of months while we clean out Oriente by orthodox military means. Or pay a prohibitive price in casualties by a crash campaign to clean up Oriente in a hurry. We'd lose as many lives to the conditions down there as we would to the enemy in a crash campaign. So, it's my notion that it's a time to gamble—my notion, by the way, not Staff's. They don't know anything about this; and wouldn't stand for it if they did. Care to try your idea of throwing a scare into Newton, after all?"
"With pleasure!" said Donal, quickly, his eyes glowing.
"Save your enthusiasm until you hear what you're going to have to do it with," replied Lludrow, dryly. "Newton maintains a steady screen of ninety ships of the first class, in defensive orbit around it. I can give you five."
SUB-PATROL CHIEF
"Five!" said Donai He felt a small crawling sensa-tion down his spine. He had, before Lludrow turned him down the first time, worked out rather carefully what could be done with Newton and how a man might go about it. His plan had called for a lean and compact little fighting force of thirty first-class ships in a triangular organization of three sub-patrols, ten ships to each.
"You see," Lludrow was explaining, "it's not what craft I have available—even with what losses we've just suffered, my Blue Patrol counts over seventy ships of the first class, alone. It's what ships I can trust to you on a job where at least the officers and probably the men as well will realize that it's a mission that should be completely volunteer and that's being sneaked off when Staff's back is turned. The captains of these ships are all strongly loyal to me, personally, or I couldn't have picked them." He looked at Donal. "All right," he said. "I know it's impossible. Just agree with me and we can forget the matter."
"Can I count on obedience?" asked Donal.
"That," said Lludrow, "is the one thing I can guarantee you."
"I'll have to improvise," said Donal. "I'll go in with them, look at the situation, and see what can be done."
"Fair enough. It's decided then."
"It's decided," said Donal.
"Then come along." Lludrow turned and led him out of the office and through corridors to a lock. They passed through the lock to a small courier ship, empty and waiting for them there; and took it to a ship of the first class, some fifteen minutes off.
Ushered into the ship's large and complex main control room. Donal found five senior captains waiting for him. Lludrow accepted a salute from a gray-haired powerful-looking man, who by saluting revealed himself as captain of this particular ship.
"Captain Bannerman," said Lludrow, introducing him to Donal, "Captain Graeme." Donal concealed a start well. In the general process of his thinking, he had forgotten that a promotion for himself would be necessary. You could hardly put a Staff Liaison with a field rank of commandant over men captaining ships of the first class.
"Gentlemen," said Lludrow, turning to the other executive officers. "I've been forced to form your five ships rather hastily into a new Sub-Patrol unit. Captain
Graeme will be your new chief. You'll form a reconnaissance outfit to do certain work near the very center of the enemy space area; and I want to emphasize the point that Captain Graeme's command is absolute. You will obey any and all of his orders without question. Now, are there any questions any of you would like to ask before he assumes command?"
The five captains were silent.
"Fine, then." Lludrow led Donal down the line. "Captain Graeme, this is Captain Aseini."
"Honored," said Donal, shaking hands.
"Captain Sukaya-Mendez."
"At your service, captain."
"Captain El Man."
"Honored," said Donal. A scarred Dorsai face neanng forty looked at him. "I believe I know your family name, captain. High Island, isn't it?"
"Sir, near Bridgehead," answered El Man. "I've heard of the Graemes." Donal moved on.
"And Captain Ruoul." "Honored."
"Well, then," said Lludrow, stepping back briskly. "I'll leave the command in your hands, Captain Graeme. Anything in the way of special supplies?"
"Torpedoes, sir," answered Donal.
"I'll have Armaments Supply contact you," said Lludrow, And left.
Five hours later, with several hundred extra torpedoes loaded, the five-ship Sub-Patrol moved out for deep space. It was DonaTs wish that they get clear of the home base as soon as possible and off where the nature of their expedition could not be discovered and countermanded. With the torpedoes, Lee had come aboard; Donal having remembered that his orderly had been left aboard the C4J. Lee had come through the battle very well, being strapped in his hammock harness throughout in a section of the ship mat was undamaged by the hit that had pierced to the control room. Now, Donal had definite instructions for him.
"I want you with me, this time," he said. "You'll stay by me. I doubt very much I might need you; but if I do, I want you in sight."
"I'll be there," said Lee, unemotionally.
They had been talking in the Patrol chief's stateroom, which had been opened to Donal. Now, Donal headed for the main control room, Lee following behind. When Donal reached that nerve center of the ship, he found all three of the snip's officers engaged in calculating the phase shift, with Bannerman overseeing.
"Sir!" said Bannerman as Donal came up. Looking at him, Donal was reminded of his mathematics instructor at school; and he was suddenly and painfully reminded of his own youth.
"About ready to shift?" asked Donal.
"In about two minutes. Since you specified no particular conclusion point, the computer run was a short one. We've merely been making the usual checks to make sure mere's no danger of collision with any object. A four light-year jump, sir."
(4Good," said Donal. "Come here with me, Bannerman."
He led the way over to the larger and rather more elaborate Control Eye that occupied the center of this control room; and pressed keys. A scene from the library file of the ship filled the globe. It showed a green-white planet with two moons floating in space and lit by the illumination from a G2 type sun.
'The orange and the two pips," said Bannerman, revealing a moonless Freilander's dislikes for natural planetary satellites.
"Yes," said Donal. "Newton." He looked at Bannerman. "How close can we hit it?"
"Sir?" said Bannerman, looking around at him. Donal waited, holding his eyes steady on the older man. Bannerman's gaze shifted and dropped back to the scene in the Eye.
"We can come out as close as you want, sir," he answered. "See, in deep space jumps, we have to stop to make observations and establish our location precisely. But the precise location of any civilized planet's already established. To come out at a safe distance from their defenses, I'd say, sir—"
"I didn't ask you for a safe distance from their defenses," said Donal, quietly. "I said—how close?"
Bannerman looked up again. His face had not paled; but there was now a set quality about it. He looked at Donal for several seconds.
"How close?" he echoed. "Two planetary diameters."
"Thank you, captain," said Donal.
"Shift in ten seconds," announced the First Officer's voice; and began to count down. "Nine seconds— eight—seven—six—five—four—three—two—shiftl" They shifted.
"Yes," said Donal, as if the shift itself had never interrupted what he was about to say, "out here where it's nice and empty, we're going to set up a maneuver, and I want all the ships to practice it. If you'll call a captain's conference, captain."
Bannerman walked over to the control board and put in the call. Fifteen minutes later, with all junior officers dismissed, they gathered in the privacy of the control room of Bannerman's ship and Donal explained what he had in mind.
"In theory," he said, "our Patrol is just engaged in reconnaissance. In actuality, we're going to try to simulate an attacking force making an assault on the planet Newton."
He waited a minute to allow the weight of his words to register on their minds; and then went on to explain his intentions.
They were to set up a simulated planet on their ship's instruments. They would approach this planet, which was to represent Newton, according to a random pattern and from different directions, first a single ship, then two together, then a series of single ships—and so on. They would, theoretically, appear into phase just before the planet, fire one or more torpedoes, complete their run past the planet and immediately go out of phase again. The intention would be to simulate the laying of a pattern of explosions covering the general surface of the planet.
There was, however, to be one main difference. Their torpedoes were to be exploded well without the outer ring of Newton's orbits of defense, as if the torpedoes were merely intended as a means to release some radiation or material which was planned to fall in toward the planet, spreading as it went.
And, one other thing, the runs were to be so timed that the five-ship force, by rotation, could appear to be a large fleet engaged in continuous bombardment.
"... Any suggestions or comments?" asked Donal, winding it up. Beyond the group facing him, he could see Lee, lounging against the control room wall and watching the captains with a colorless gaze.
There was no immediate response; and then Ban-nerman spoke up slowly, as if he felt it had devolved upon him, the unwelcome duty of being spokesman for the group.
"Sir," he said, "what about the chances of collision?"
"They'll be high, I know," said Donal. "Especially with the defending ships. But we'll just have to take our chances."
"May I ask how many runs we'll be making?"
"As many," said Donal, "as we can." He looked deliberately around the group. "I want you gentlemen to understand. We're going to make every possible attempt to avoid open battle or accidental casualties. But these things may not be avoidable considering the necessarily high number of runs."
"How many runs did you have in mind, captain?" asked Sukaya-Mendez.
"I don't see," replied Donal, "how we can effectively present the illusion of a large fleet engaged in saturation bombardment of a world in under a full two hours of continuous runs."
'Two hours!" said Bannerman. There was an in- stmctive murmur from the group. "Sir," continued Bannerman. "Even at five minutes a run, that amounts with five ships to better than two runs an hour. If we double up, or if there's casualties it could run as high as four. That's eight phase shifts to an hour—sixteen in a two-hour period. Sir, even doped to the ears, the men on our ships can't take that."
"Do you know of anyone who ever tried, captain?" inquired Donal.
"No, sir—" began Bannerman.
"Then how do we know it can't be done?" Donal did not wait for an answer. "The point is, it must be done. You're being required only to navigate your ships and fire possibly two torpedoes. That doesn't require the manpower it would to fight your ships under ordinary conditions. If some of your men become unfit for duty, make shift with the ones you have left."
"Shai Dorsai!" murmured the scarred El Man; and Donal glanced toward him, as grateful for the support as for the compliment.
"Anyone want out?" Donal asked crisply.
There was a slow, but emphatic, mutter of negation from all of them.
"Right." Donal took a step back from them. "Then let's get about our practice runs. Dismissed, gentlemen."
He watched the four from other ships leave the control room.
"Better feed and rest the crews," Donal said, turning to Bannerman. "And get some rest yourself. I intend to. Have a couple of meals sent to my quarters."
"Sir," acknowledged Bannerman. Donal turned and left the control room, followed by Lee as by a shadow. The Cobyman was silent until they were in the stateroom; then he growled: "What did that scarface mean by calling you shy?"
"Shy?" Donal turned about in surprise.
"Shaey, shy—something like that."
"Oh," Donal smiled at the expression on the other's face. "That wasn't an insult, Lee. It was a pat on the back. Shai was what he said. It means something like—true, pure, the actual."
Lee grunted. Then he nodded.
"I guess you can figure on him," he said.
The food came, a tray for each of them. Donal ate lightly and stretched himself out on the couch. It seemed he dropped instantly into sleep; and when he awoke at the touch of Lee's hand on his shoulder he knew he had been dreaming—but of what, he could not remember. He remembered only a movement of shapes in obscurity, as of some complex physics problem resolving itself in terms of direction and mass, somehow given substance.
"Practice about to start," said Lee.
"Thank you, orderly," he said automatically. He got to his feet and headed toward the control room, shedding the druggedness of his sleep as he went. Lee had followed him, but he was not aware of this until the Cobyman pushed a couple of small white tablets into his hand.
"Medication," said Lee. Donal swallowed them automatically. Bannerman, over by the control board, had seen him come in, and now turned and came across the floor.
"Ready for the first practice run, sir," he said. "Where would you like to observe—controls, or Eye?"
Donal looked and saw they had a chair set up for him in both locations.
"Eye," he said. "Lee, you can take the other chair, as long as there does not seem to be one for you."
"Captain, you—"
"I know, Bannerman," said Donal, "I should have mentioned the fact I meant to have my orderly up here. I'm sorry."
"Not at all, sir." Bannerman went over and fitted himself into his own chair, followed by Lee. Donal turned his attention to the Eye.
The five ships were in line, in deep space, at thousand-kilometer intervals. He looked at their neat Indian file and stepped up the magnification slightly so that in spite of the distance that should have made even the nearest invisible, they appeared in detail, in-lighted by the Eye.
"Sir," said Bannerman; and his quiet voice carried easily across the room. "I've arranged a key-in. When we make our phase shift, that library tape will replace the image in the Eye, so you can see what our approach will actually look like."
"Thank you, captain."
"Phase shift in ten seconds—"
The count-down ticked off like the voice of a clock. Then, there was the sensation of a phase shift; and abruptly Donal was sweeping closely over a planet, barely fifty thousand kilometers distance from its surface. "Fire—" and "Fire—" spoke the speaker in the control room ceiling. Again, the indescribable destruction and rebuilding of the body. The world was gone and they were again in deep space.
Donal looked at the four other ships in line. Abruptly the leading one disappeared. The rest continued, seemingly, to hang there, without motion. There was no sound in the control room about him. The seconds crept by, became minutes. The minutes crawled. Suddenly—a ship appeared in front of Ban-nerman's craft.
Donal looked back at the three behind. Now, there were only two.
The run continued until all the ships had made their pass.
"Again," ordered Donal.
They did it again; and it went off without a hitch.
"Rest," said Donal, getting out of the chair. "Captain, pass the word for all ships to give their personnel a break of half an hour. Make sure everyone is fed, rested, and supplied with medication. Also supply every person with extra medication to be taken as needed. Then, I'd like to talk to you, personally."
When Bannerman had accomplished these orders and approached Donal, Donal took him aside.
"How about the reactions of the men?" he asked.
"Fine, captain," Bannerman said; and Donal was surprised to read a true enthusiasm in his voice, "We've got good crews, here. High level-ratings, and experience."
"I'm glad to hear it," said Donal, thankfully. "Now ... about the time interval—"
"Five minutes exactly, sir." Bannerman looked at him inquiringly. "We can shorten slightly, or lengthen as much as you want."
"No," said Donal. "I just wanted to know. Do you have battle dress for me and my orderly?"
"It's coming up from stores."