Big Book of Science Fiction (34 page)

It wasn’t. An unsteady shape
wandered up in the darkness, murmuring a song and exhaling alcohol. He
recognized the Chief Archivist, Glen.

“This is Service country, mister,”
he told Glen.

“Hullo, Arris,” the round little
civilian said, peering at him. “I come down here regularly—regularly against
regulations— to wear off my regular irregularities with the wine bottle. That’s
all right, isn’t it?”

He was drunk and argumentative.
Arris felt hemmed in. Glen couldn’t be talked into leaving without loss of
dignity to the wing commander, and he couldn’t be chucked out because he was
writing a biography of the chamberlain and could, for the time being, have any
head in the palace for the asking. Arris sat down unhappily, and Glen plumped
down beside him.

The little man asked him.

“Is that a fleet from the
Frontier League?” He pointed to the big screen. Arris didn’t look at his face,
but felt that Glen was grinning maliciously.

“I know of no organization called
the Frontier League,” Arris said. “If you are referring to the brigands who
have recently been operating in Galactic East, you could at least call them by
their proper names.” Really, he thought— civilians!

“So sorry. But the brigands
should have the Regulus Cluster by now, shouldn’t they?” he asked,
insinuatingly.

This was serious—a grave breach
of security. Arris turned to the little man.

“Mister, I have no authority to
command you,” he said measuredly. “Furthermore, I understand you are enjoying a
temporary eminence in the non-service world which would make it very difficult
for me to—ah—tangle with you. I shall therefore refer only to your altruism.
How did you find out about the Regulus Cluster?”

“Eloquent!” murmured the little
man, smiling happily. “I got it from Rome.”

Arris searched his memory. “You
mean Squadron Commander Romo broke security? I can’t believe it!”

“No, commander. I mean Rome—a
place—a time—a civilization. I got it also from Babylon, Assyria, the Mogul
Raj— every one of them. You don’t understand me, of course.”

“I understand that you’re
trifling with Service security and that you’re a fat little, malevolent,
worthless drone and scribbler!”

“Oh, commander!” protested the
archivist. “I’m not so little!” He wandered away, chuckling.

Arris wished he had the shooting
of him, and tried to explore the chain of secrecy for a weak fink. He was tired
and bored by this harping on the Fron—on the brigands.

His aide tentatively approached
him. “Interceptors in striking range, sir,” he murmured.

“Thank you,” said the wing
commander, genuinely grateful to be back in the clean, etched-line world of the
Service and out of that blurred, water-color, civilian land where long-dead
Syrians apparently retailed classified matter to nasty little drunken warts who
had no business with it. Arris confronted the sixty-incher. The particle that
had become three particles was now—he counted—eighteen particles. Big ones.
Getting bigger.

He did not allow himself emotion,
but turned to the plot on the interceptor squadron.

“Set up Lunar relay,” he ordered.

“Yessir.”

Half the plot room crew bustled
silently and efficiently about the delicate job of applied relativistic physics
that was ‘lunar relay.’ He knew that the palace power plant could take it for a
few minutes, and he wanted to
see.
If he could not believe radar pips,
he might believe a video screen.

On the great, green circle, the
eighteen—now twenty-four— particles neared the thirty-six smaller particles
that were interceptors, led by the eager young Efrid.

“Testing Lunar relay, sir,” said
the chief teck.

The wing commander turned to a
twelve-inch screen. Unobtrusively, behind him tecks jockeyed for position. The
picture on the screen was something to see. The chief let mercury fill a
thick-walled, ceramic tank. There was a sputtering and contact was made.

“Well done,” said Arris. “Perfect
seeing.”

He saw, upper left, a globe of
ships—what ships! Some were Service jobs, with extra turrets plastered on them
wherever there was room. Some were orthodox freighters, with the same
porcupine-bristle of weapons. Some were obviously home-made crates, hideously
ugly—and as heavily armed as the others.

Next to him, Arris heard his aide
murmur, “It’s all wrong, sir. They haven’t got any pick-up boats. They haven’t
got any hospital ships. What happens when one of them gets shot up?”

“Just what ought to happen, Evan,”
snapped the wing commander. “They float in space until they desiccate in their
suits. Or if they get grappled inboard with a boat hook, they don’t get any
medical care. As I told you, they’re brigands, without decency even to care for
their own.” He enlarged on the theme. “Their morale must be insignificant
compared with our men’s. When the Service goes into action, every rating and
teck knows he’ll be cared for if he’s hurt. Why, if we didn’t have pick-up
boats and hospital ships the men wouldn’t—” He almost finished it with “fight,”
but thought, and lamely ended—”wouldn’t like it.”

Evan nodded, wonderingly, and
crowded his chief a little as he craned his neck for a look at the screen.

“Get the hell away from here!”
said the wing commander in a restrained yell, and Evan got.

The interceptor squadron swam
into the field—a sleek, deadly needle of vessels in perfect alignment, with its
little cloud of pick-ups trailing, and farther astern a white hospital ship
with the ancient red cross.

The contact was immediate and
shocking. One of the rebel ships lumbered into the path of the interceptors,
spraying fire from what seemed to be as many points as a man has pores. The
Service ships promptly fiddled it and it should have drifted away—but it didn’t.
It kept on fighting. It rammed an interceptor with a crunch that must have
killed every man before the first bulwark, but aft of the bulwark the ship kept
fighting.

It took a torpedo portside and
its plumbing drifted through space in a tangle. Still the starboard side kept
squirting fire. Isolated weapon blisters fought on while they were obviously
cut off from the rest of the ship. It was a pounded tangle of wreckage, and it
had destroyed two interceptors, crippled two more, and kept fighting.

Finally, it drifted away, under
feeble jets of power. Two more of the fantastic rebel fleet wandered into
action, but the wing commander’s horrified eyes were on the first pile of
scrap. It was going
somewhere—

The ship neared the thin-skinned,
unarmored. gleaming hospital vessel, rammed it amidships, square in one of the
red crosses, and then blew itself up, apparently with everything left in its
powder magazine, taking the hospital ship with it.

The sickened wing commander would
never have recognized what he had seen as it was told in a later version, thus:

“The
crushing course they took

And
nobly knew

Their
death undaunted

By
heroic blast

The
hospital’s host

They
dragged to doom

Hail!
Men without mercy

From
the far frontier!”

Lunar relay flickered out as
overloaded fuses flashed into vapor. Arris distractedly paced back to the dark
corner and sank into a chair.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice of
Glen next to him, sounding quite sincere. “No doubt it was quite a shock to
you.”

“Not to you?” asked Arris
bitterly.

“Not to me.”

“Then how did they do it?” the wing
commander asked the civilian in a low, desperate whisper. “They don’t even wear
.45’s. Intelligence says their enlisted men have hit their officers and got
away with it. They
elect
ship captains! Glen, what does it all mean?”

“It means,” said the fat little
man with a timbre of doom in his voice, “that they’ve returned. They always
have. They always will. You see, commander, there is always somewhere a
wealthy, powerful city, or nation, or world. In it are those whose blood is not
right for a wealthy, powerful place. They must seek danger and overcome it. So
they go out—on the marshes, in the desert, on the tundra, the planets, or the
stars. Being strong, they grow stronger by fighting the tundra, the planets or
the stars. They—they change. They sing new songs. They know new heroes. And
then, one day, they return to their old home.

“They return to the wealthy,
powerful city, or nation or world. They fight its guardians as they fought the
tundra, the planets or the stars—a way that strikes terror to the heart. Then
they sack the city, nation or world and sing great, ringing sagas of their
deeds. They always have. Doubtless they always will.”

“‘But what shall we do?”

“We shall cower, I suppose,
beneath the bombs they drop on us, and we shall die, some bravely, some not,
defending the palace within a very few hours’. But you will have your revenge.”

“How?” asked the wing commander,
with haunted eyes.

The fat little man giggled and
whispered in the officer’s ear. Arris irritably shrugged it off as a bad joke.
He didn’t believe it. As he died, drilled through the chest a few hours later
by one of Algan’s gunfighters, he believed it even less.

~ * ~

The
professor’s lecture was drawing to a close. There was time for only one more
joke to send his students away happy. He was about to spring it when a
messenger handed him two slips of paper. He raged inwardly at his ruined exit
and poisonously read from them:

“I have been asked to make two
announcements. One, a bulletin from General Sleg’s force. He reports that the
so-called Outland Insurrection is being brought under control and that there is
no cause for alarm. Two, the gentlemen who are members of the S.O.T.C. will
please report to the armory at 1375 hours—whatever that may mean—for blaster
inspection. The class is dismissed.”

Petulantly, he swept from the
lectern and through the door.

<>

~ * ~