Collected Short Fiction, page 392
Joe had joined just for kicks. I don’t think he had ever expected to get into battle. I remember how he looked the day we were packing up, leaving White Sands to go to the Orbiter for maneuvers.
He was a thin kid with dark oily skin, narrow flickering eyes, a ratty snout. This morning he looked greener than ever as he flittered around the barracks collecting his gear. Once he turned to me.
“Mort?”
“What is it, kid?” I was only two years older than Joey, but that gave me a tremendous boost in authority.
“Mort, you think this war thing is going to last?”
I shrugged. “Those Martians can be tough, y’know. I wouldn’t be surprised if the war lasts for years.”
“You mean we’ll have to fight?”
“Looks that way,” I said. “We’ll be hitting the Wheel January 18. Three months’ maneuvers and we’re ready for combat April 18. If the war’s not over by then we’ll be in it, buster. Scared?”
“No, Mort, no,” he said hastily. But a thousand nos wouldn’t have changed the way his face looked. And his eyes and dry lips were answering, Yes, yes, I’m scared witless all the time his tongue was saying “No.”
Joey, I knew, had joined the Spaceborne just to see the great outdoors. He’d been suckered in by posters just at the wrong time. Many a kid joined up, served his three-year hitch, and got out—with something to tell his kids and his grandchildren and, if the geriatricians did a good job, his greatgrandchildren. We were the unlucky ones who just managed to catch the Earth-Mars scrap, that’s all. And Joey wasn’t the only one that was scared.
Hell, no. Deep down inside us we were all cold purple with panic. No one knew too much about the Marties except that they were dried-out leathery squids on legs, and we didn’t much care to tangle with them. That morning the whole 103rd Spaceborne knew what faced them, and there wasn’t a man of us who didn’t look a mite greener about the gill for it.
But we knew how to hide it. Joey didn’t. And so we pretended to be brave, and walked around grinning with a gaiety we didn’t feel, while Joey Hammond’s knees clacked together in the terror we all shared.
WE HIT THE WHEEL on January 18, right on the button, and maneuvers started. We did a lot of buzzing around in space, learning how to make a ship spit death, how to gut a Martie two-manner on minimum wattage, how to get the energy screens up before an enemy bolt cooked us. We were practicing to be killers, and the part didn’t fit some of us.
A few of the boys took to it with vigor. Hart Crayden, Joey’s leading persecutor, caught the knack of spacegunning and blew up-so many practice craft on our dry runs that he was excused from further drill on the ground that he was fouling up the budget. I wasn’t too bad either. Joey was a total dub—but he stayed. Give him credit; he didn’t funk out. He stayed.
All this time we were getting word from Mars. Our boys had already made the big push; skirmishes were going on in the Intermundia, which was the fancy name they used for the big area of space between Mars and Earth. To date four of our ships had slipped through Mars lines and given it to their cities; Earth hadn’t been touched, though Luna City got its dome smashed by a suicide raider one night and five thousand people died.
The Marties were getting thrown back, slowly but surely. Joey kept asking, “You think the war’s goin’ to be over before we get there?” He didn’t even try to hide his feelings after a while.
“It better be wrapped up in three weeks then,” I told him. And then it was two weeks, and then one, and then it became obvious that it wouldn’t be over till we got there.
By March of that year the Marties were really on the run. We’d obliterated the Phobos base almost entirely and a shrewdly placed fusion bomb had played hell with one of their icecaps, flooding territory that hardly knew what water was like. They were dying about twice as fast as we were—but our men were getting mowed down too. It was the bloodiest, ugliest war in the history of the universe—which may be the reason why there hasn’t been even a whimper of trouble in the ninety years since the war ended. We haven’t used up the supply of horror left from the last one.
Finally April 18 came, and the 103rd Spaceborne was pronounced ready for action. I thought Joey would have a fit when the news came.
But he didn’t. He turned pale, but held his ground.
“We’re going up there,” he said hoarsely. “We’re goin’ to kill the Marties.”
“Damn right we are,” Hart Crayden roared. “We’re going to blast the leather-skinned buggers right out of the sky!”
“We’ll give it to ’em,” someone else shouted.
“Yeah!”
Our morale was the highest it had ever been—which, translated, meant that we were whooping it up more than ever, to conceal the fact that we were getting ready to put our lives on the firing line and pretty damned scared about it.
Joey didn’t whoop. He sat on the edge of his hammock and looked spacesick. He obviously didn’t feel much like killing Marties—and he sure as blazes didn’t care to get killed himself.
THE BIG PUSH was on—the bombardment of Mars and its Deimos base with everything we could throw at them. The idea was to get the war over with in a hurry, before it wrecked Earth’s economy forever. I forget how many billions of dollars a second it was costing us to keep fighting.
The 103rd got assigned to the Deimos Bombardment. Our job was to ring the Martian moon with a fleet of tiny two-man ships—Stingers, we were calling them—and attempt to penetrate the energy screens erected around the base. It was impossible for the Martians to defend and attack at once; every time they lowered the screens to fire at one of us, the rest of us would drive our beams through and do what damage we could. It was slow, but it was working. We were winning.
As it worked out Joey Hammond and Hart Crayden were assigned to the same Stinger; I drew as my partner Lew Forsham, a colorless Oklahoman who operated a beamgun with tireless efficiency. Crayden grumbled a bit; he was our best gunner, though, and that was probably why he was assigned to our worst pilot—just to even out the peaks.
We left the Main Orbiter in formation, and space was dusty with the bright motes of our hundreds of ships. The 103rd Spaceborne was at last on the way.
We were in full radio contact with each other; I switched from ship to ship as I sat at my controls, talking first to one man, then another. We all knew that only half of us were coming back; the rest were sure to be atoms before the week was out.
Joey was the only man who wasn’t bubbling with small talk. When I tuned him in he said, “Hi, Mort,” and that was it. Behind him I heard Crayden grunt, “Say hello for me.”
I tuned out. During the past weeks I had accepted more or less willingly the task of being Joey’s guardian angel—but now, when my own life was being risked, I didn’t care to be depressed by his gloom. So I kept away from his band.
Just as the red gleam of Mars was swelling in our viewplates Joey tuned me in.
“There’s Mars,” he said. “We’re really there.”
I didn’t know what to say. I kept quiet.
“Wish me luck, Mort,” he said.
“Sure, Joey. Luck. Just keep back of the wheel and duck when the purple bolts go whizzing by.” I managed a cold chuckle.
“Thanks, Mort.” There was silence. Then: “Mort, I don’t want to die!”
“None of us do, kid. We’re all scared.”
“You’re just talking,” he said, and tuned out.
I glanced out the screen. Mars was up ahead. Moving around it like goldfish round a whale was Objective Number One, goal for tonight.
Deimos.
WE SWEPT INTO the battle formation we knew so well by now. A thick cloud of stingers surrounded the little globe of Deimos. The Martian defensive screens sparkled bluely at us, and a few Martie two-manners rose from the home world to attack us.
I saw bright beams lash out at the defenders and ash them. And then the battle began—the Battle of Deimos.
The sky was illuminated with force-beams. Grimly we hung on, pouring the juice down on Deimos’ screens, battering at the Martie outpost, giving all we had. I clung to my controls, feeling the sweat go pouring down my body, while at my side Gunner For sham gave ’em hell. The ship throbbed as megawatt after megawatt of power barrelled into the Martian screens.
The tension grew. Around me from time to time a Stinger would wink out of being as a Martie beam would catch it and demoleculize it—but every time that happened our beams would smash mercilessly into the defense gap thus created. The net tightened. We drew closer. Closer.
Radio contact was blotched by static but we kept together, shouting encouragement at each other to keep up morale. I saw Joey’s ship still with us, moving in and in.
The screen below us pulsed like a wounded elephant.
Forsham punched the firing stud again and again, jabbing down murderously. The Marties were giving ground. The tension was man-killing, but we were beating them.
Then a heatbeam licked up from down below and swept over us. I felt the ship’s refrigerant system groan as the beam caught us; I dodged and it went by. Forsham put a bolt where the beam was coming from and it stopped, but another rose.
Suddenly I heard Joey yelling, “They’re cooking us! They’re cooking us!”
Behind his voice came Crayden’s grunt. “Get out of the beam, you idiot! They’ll roast us if you don’t dodge.”
I went cold. I knew what had happened: Joey had frozen at the wheel, gone deadhead with fright, and his Stinger was caught smack in a heatbeam. Down on Deimos I knew some Martie gunner was having the time of his life pouring on the juice. A heatbeam was strictly a diversionary tactic, but if it stayed on a given ship long enough it could kill.
My suitmike brought the sound of struggling coming from Joe’s ship. Crayden was obviously trying to get him away from the controls. I heard Joey yell, “I’m scared! I gotta get out! I gotta get out!”
“Look at the crazy guy,” Forsham whispered harshly. And I looked.
Joey’s ship was to my left at four o’clock. I saw the airlock open and a spacesuited figure come out. It was Joey. He was yelling, “I’m gonna get out of here.”
I don’t know where he thought he was going. He was crazy with fear.
He clung to the outside of his ship for a second, then put his boots against the skin and kicked away, swimming in the general direction of Earth. The heatbeam swung away from his Stinger and caught him for a fraction of a second. That was enough. That was more than enough.
“Hot!” he yelled, and choked off. He was cooked to a crisp in a second.
I heard Crayden, still inside the Ship, mutter into the mike, “I’m out of control. Joey locked the drive and I can’t get it unfrozen. I’m—”
And then he crashed. The ship hit Deimos Base’s screen with a terrible impact, and in the moment of collision those of us who were left threw all the megawattage we could into those screens.
A YEAR LATER, when the Treaty had been signed, when the scarred and blasted wreckage of Mars was being rebuilt, and when the System was just beginning the peace that has lasted till this day and will probably last forever, I was mustered out with honors. A hero, they called me—along with all the others who survived, and those who didn’t. No one ever said anything about Joey Hammond’s insane attempt to run away by getting out of his ship.
Years afterward, a Patrol ship found a body in a spacesuit orbiting around Mars. The body was blacked to a crisp, totally unrecognizable. Medics who worked over it couldn’t identify it at all.
The spacesuit was in pretty good shape, though. It was identified as a 2106 model—and thus the man inside it was identified as a Terran soldier who had died nobly in the attack on Mars and who had been orbiting in space ever since.
They were right except for one word—“nobly.” Because there wasn’t much doubt who the man was, at least in my mind. It could only have been Joey Hammond.
They took him to the Capital and I hear they’ve built him a lovely monument.
So I guess it’s all right. In a way he’s a symbol of all the rest of us who lived or died that day. I think I’ll make a trip to the Unknown Spaceman’s tomb next week, if the doctors will let me. I think I’ll bring Joey Hammond a wreath.
Come into My Brain!
Fitted with the new thought-helmet, Dane Harrell plunged into the venomous brain of the alien. It was a fast way to commit suicide! . . .
DANE HARRELL held the thought-helmet tightly between his hands, and, before putting it on, glanced over at the bound, writhing alien sitting opposite him. The alien snarled defiantly at him.
“You’re sure you want to go through with this?” asked Dr. Phelps.
Harrell nodded. “I volunteered, didn’t I? I said I’d take a look inside this buzzard’s brain, and I’m going to do it. If I don’t come up in half an hour, come get me.”
“Right.”
Harrell slipped the cool bulk of the thought-helmet over his head and signalled to the scientist, who pulled the actuator switch. Harrell shuddered as psionic current surged through him; he stiffened, wriggled, and felt himself glide out of his body, hover incorporeally in the air between his now soulless shell and the alien bound opposite.
Remember, you volunteered, he told himself.
He hung for a moment outside the alien’s skull; then he drifted downward and in. He had entered the alien’s mind. Whether he would emerge alive, and with the troop-deployment data—well, that was another matter entirely.
The patrol-ships of the Terran outpost on Planetoid 113 had discovered the alien scout a week before. The Dimellian spy was lurking about the outermost reaches of the Terran safety zone when he was caught.
It wasn’t often that Earth captured a Dimellian alive, and so the Outpost resolved to comb as much information from the alien as possible. The Earth-Dimell war was four years old; neither side had succeeded in scoring a decisive victory over the other. It was believed that Dimell was massing its fleets for an all-out attack on Earth itself; confirmation of this from the captured scout would make Terran defensive tactics considerably more sound.
But the Dimellian resisted all forms of brainwashing, until Phelps, the Base Psych-man, came forth with the experimental thought-helmet. Volunteers were requested; Harrell spoke up first. Now, wearing the thought-helmet, he plunged deep into the unknown areas of the Dimellian’s mind, hoping to emerge with high-order military secrets.
His first impression was of thick grey murk—so thick it could be cut. Using a swimming motion, Harrell drifted downward, toward the light in the distance. It was a long way down; he floated, eerily, in free-fall.
Finally he touched ground. It yielded under him spongily, but it was solid. He looked around. The place was alien: coarse crumbly red soil, giant spike-leaved trees that shot up hundreds of feet overhead, brutal-looking birds squawking and chattering in the low branches.
It looked just like the tridim solidos of Dimell he had seen. Well, why not? Why shouldn’t the inside of a man’s mind—or an alien’s, for that matter, resemble his home world?
Cautiously, Harrell started to walk. Mountains rose in the dim distance, and he could see, glittering on a mountaintop far beyond him, the white bulk of an armored castle. Of course! His imaginative mind realized at once that there was where the Dimellian guarded the precious secrets; up there, on the mountain, was his goal.
He started to walk.
Low-hanging vines obscured his way; he conjured up a machete and cut them down. The weapon felt firm and real in his hand—but he paused to realize that not even the hand was real; all this was but an imaginative projection.
The castle was further away than he had thought, he saw, after he had walked for perhaps fifteen minutes. There was no telling duration inside the alien’s skull, either. Or distance. The castle seemed just as distant now as when he had begun, and his fifteen-minute journey through the jungle had tired him.
Suddenly demonic laughter sounded up ahead in the jungle. Harsh, ugly laughter.
And the Dimellian appeared, slashing his way through the vines with swashbuckling abandon.
“Get out of my mind, Earthman!”
THE DIMELLIAN was larger than life, and twice as ugly. It was an idealized, self-glorified mental image Harrell faced.
The captured Dimellian was about five feet tall, thick-shouldered, with sturdy, corded arms and supplementary tentacles sprouting from its shoulders; its skin was green and leathery, dotted with toad-like warts.
Harrell now saw a creature close to nine feet tall, swaggering, with a mighty barrel of a chest and a huge broadsword clutched in one of its arms. The tentacles writhed purposefully.
“You know why I’m here, alien. I want to know certain facts. And I’m not getting out of your mind until I’ve wrung them from you.”
The alien’s lipless mouth curved upward in a bleak smile. “Big words, little Earthman. But first you’ll have to vanquish me.”
And the Dimellian stepped forward.
Harrell met the downcrashing blow of the alien’s broadsword fully; the shock of impact sent numbing shivers up his arm as far as his shoulder, but he held on and turned aside the blow. It wasn’t fair; the Dimellian had a vaster reach than he could ever hope for—
No! He saw there was no reason why he couldn’t control the size of his own mental image. Instantly he was ten feet high, and advancing remorselessly toward the alien.
Swords clashed clangorously; the forest-birds screamed. Harrell drove the alien back . . . back . . .
And the Dimellian was eleven feet high.
“We can keep this up forever,” Harrell said. “Getting larger and larger. This is only a mental conflict.” He shot up until he again towered a foot above the alien’s head. He swung downward twohandedly with the machete—
The alien vanished.
And reappeared five feet to the right, grinning evilly. “Enough of this foolishness, Earthman. Physical conflict will be endless stalemate, since we’re only mental projections, both of us. You’re beaten; there’s no possible way you can defeat me, or I defeat you. Don’t waste your time and mine. Get out of my mind!”
