Instead circumstances forced me to do what I loved best.
That summer ended happily in other ways as well. To the vast surprise of all, my draft board granted me my conscientious objector status. (Perhaps “The Hero” had a bit to do with that. I’d sent it in as part of my application.) With my low lottery number, I was still called up to serve at the end of the summer…but now, instead of flying off to Vietnam, I was returning to Chicago for two years of alternative service with VISTA.
During the next decade I would find myself directing chess tournaments and teaching college…but those were only things I did, to pay the rent. After the summer of ’71, when people asked me what I was, I always said, “A writer.”
THE HERO
THE CITY WAS DEAD AND THE FLAMES OF ITS PASSING SPREAD A RED stain across the green-gray sky.
It had been a long time dying. Resistance had lasted almost a week and the fighting had been bitter for a while. But in the end the invaders had broken the defenders, as they had broken so many others in the past. The alien sky with its double sun did not bother them. They had fought and won under skies of azure blue and speckled gold and inky black.
The Weather Control boys had hit first, while the main force was still hundreds of miles to the east. Storm after storm had flailed at the streets of the city, to slow defensive preparations and smash the spirit of resistance.
When they were closer the invaders had sent up howlers. Unending high-pitched shrieks had echoed back and forth both day and night and before long most of the populace had fled in demoralized panic. By then the attackers’ main force was in range and launched plague bombs on a steady westward wind.
Even then the natives had tried to fight back. From their defensive emplacements ringing the city the survivors had sent up a hail of atomics, managing to vaporize one whole company whose defensive screens were overloaded by the sudden assault. But the gesture was a feeble one at best. By that time incendiary bombs were raining down steadily upon the city and great clouds of acid-gas were blowing across the plains.
And behind the gas, the dreaded assault squads of the Terran Expeditionary Force moved on the last defenses.
KAGEN SCOWLED AT THE DENTED PLASTOID HELMET AT HIS FEET AND cursed his luck. A routine mopping-up detail, he thought. A perfectly routine operation—and some damned automatic interceptor emplacement somewhere had lobbed a low-grade atomic at him.
It had been only a near miss but the shock waves had damaged his hip rockets and knocked him out of the sky, landing him in this godforsaken little ravine east of the city. His light plastoid battle armor had protected him from the impact but his helmet had taken a good whack.
Kagen squatted and picked up the dented helmet to examine it. His long-range com and all of his sensory equipment were out. With his rockets gone, too, he was crippled, deaf, dumb, and half-blind. He swore.
A flicker of movement along the top of the shallow ravine caught his attention. Five natives came suddenly into view, each carrying a hair-trigger submachine gun. They carried them at the ready, trained on Kagen. They were fanned out in line, covering him from both right and left. One began to speak.
He never finished. One instant, Kagen’s screech gun lay on the rocks at his feet. Quite suddenly it was in his hand.
Five men will hesitate where one alone will not. During the brief flickering instant before the natives’ fingers began to tighten on their triggers, Kagen did not pause, Kagen did not hesitate, Kagen did not think.
Kagen killed.
The screech gun emitted a loud, ear-piercing shriek. The enemy squad leader shuddered as the invisible beam of concentrated high-frequency sound ripped into him. Then his flesh began to liquify. By then Kagen’s gun had found two more targets.
The guns of the two remaining natives finally began to chatter. A rain of bullets enveloped Kagen as he whirled to his right and he grunted under the impact as the shots caromed off his battle armor. His screech gun leveled—and a random shot sent it spinning from his grasp.
Kagen did not hesitate or pause as the gun was wrenched from his grip. He bounded to the top of the shallow ravine with one leap, directly toward one of the soldiers.
The man wavered briefly and brought up his gun. The instant was all Kagen needed. With all the momentum of his leap behind it, his right hand smashed the gun butt into the enemy’s face and his left, backed by fifteen hundred pounds of force, hammered into the native’s body right under the breastbone.
Kagen seized the corpse and heaved it toward the second native, who had ceased fire briefly as his comrade came between himself and Kagen. Now his bullets tore into the airborne body. He took a quick step back, his gun level and firing.
And then Kagen was on him. Kagen knew a searing flash of pain as a shot bruised his temple. He ignored it, drove the edge of his hand into the native’s throat. The man toppled, lay still.
Kagen spun, still reacting, searching for the next foe.
He was alone.
Kagen bent and wiped the blood from his hand with a piece of the native’s uniform. He frowned in disgust. It was going to be a long trek back to camp, he thought, tossing the blood-soaked rag casually to the ground.
Today was definitely not his lucky day.
He grunted dismally, then scrambled back down into the ravine to recover his screech gun and helmet for the hike.
On the horizon, the city was still burning.
RAGELLI’S VOICE WAS LOUD AND CHEERFUL AS IT CAME CRACKLING over the short-range communicator nestled in Kagen’s fist.
“So it’s you, Kagen,” he said, laughing. “You signaled just in time. My sensors were starting to pick up something. Little closer and I would’ve screeched you down.”
“My helmet’s busted and the sensors are out,” Kagen replied. “Damn hard to judge distance. Long-range com is busted, too.”
“The brass was wondering what happened to you,” Ragelli cut in. “Made ’em sweat a little. But I figured you’d turn up sooner or later.”
“Right,” Kagen said. “One of these mudworms zapped the hell out of my rockets and it took me a while to get back. But I’m coming in now.”
He emerged slowly from the crater he had crouched in, coming in sight of the guard in the distance. He took it slow and easy.
Outlined against the outpost barrier, Ragelli lifted a ponderous silver-gray arm in greeting. He was armored completely in a full duralloy battlesuit that made Kagen’s plastoid armor look like tissue paper, and sat in the trigger-seat of a swiveling screech-gun battery. A bubble of defensive screens enveloped him, turning his massive figure into an indistinct blur.
Kagen waved back and began to eat up the distance between them with long, loping strides. He stopped just in front of the barrier, at the foot of Ragelli’s emplacement.
“You look damned battered,” said Ragelli, appraising him from behind a plastoid visor, aided by his sensory devices. “That light armor doesn’t buy you a nickel’s worth of protection. Any farm boy with a pea shooter can plug you.”
Kagen laughed. “At least I can move. You may be able to stand off an assault squad in that duralloy monkey suit, but I’d like to see you do anything on offense, chum. And defense doesn’t win wars.”
“Your pot,” Ragelli said. “This sentry duty is boring as hell.” He flicked a switch on his control panel and a section of the barrier winked out. Kagen was through it at once. A split second later it came back on again.
Kagen strode quickly to his squad barracks. The door slid open automatically as he approached it and he stepped inside gratefully. It felt good to be home again and back at his normal weight. These light gravity mudholes made him queasy after a while. The barracks were artificially maintained at Wellington-normal gravity, twice Earth-normal. It was expensive but the brass kept saying that nothing was too good for the comfort of our fighting men.
Kagen stripped off his plastoid armor in the squad ready room and tossed it into the replacement bin. He headed straight for his cubicle and s
prawled across the bed.
Reaching over to the plain metal table alongside his bed, he yanked open a drawer and took out a fat greenish capsule. He swallowed it hastily, and lay back to relax as it took hold throughout his system. The regulations prohibited taking synthastim between meals, he knew, but the rule was never enforced. Like most troopers, Kagen took it almost continuously to maintain his speed and endurance at maximum.
He was dozing comfortably a few minutes later when the com box mounted on the wall above his bed came to sudden life.
“Kagen.”
Kagen sat up instantly, wide awake.
“Acknowledged,” he said.
“Report to Major Grady at once.”
Kagen grinned broadly. His request was being acted on quickly, he thought. And by a high officer, no less. Dressing quickly in loose-fitting brown fatigues, he set off across the base.
The high officers’ quarters were at the center of the outpost. They consisted of a brightly lit, three-story building, blanketed overhead by defensive screens and ringed by guardsmen in light battle armor. One of the guards recognized Kagen and he was admitted on orders.
Immediately beyond the door he halted briefly as a bank of sensors scanned him for weapons. Troopers, of course, were not allowed to bear arms in the presence of high officers. Had he been carrying a screech gun alarms would have gone off all over the building while the tractor beams hidden in the walls and ceilings immobilized him completely.
But he passed the inspection and continued down the long corridor toward Major Grady’s office. A third of the way down, the first set of tractor beams locked firmly onto his wrists. He struggled the instant he felt the invisible touch against his skin—but the tractors held him steady. Others, triggered automatically by his passing, came on as he continued down the corridor.
Kagen cursed under his breath and fought with his impulse to resist. He hated being pinned by tractor beams, but those were the rules if you wanted to see a high officer.
The door opened before him and he stepped through. A full bank of tractor beams seized him instantly and immobilized him. A few adjusted slightly and he was snapped to rigid attention, although his muscles screamed resistance.
Major Carl Grady was working at a cluttered wooden desk a few feet away, scribbling something on a sheet of paper. A large stack of papers rested at his elbow, an old-fashioned laser pistol sitting on top of them as a paperweight.
Kagen recognized the laser. It was some sort of heirloom, passed down in Grady’s family for generations. The story was that some ancestor of his had used it back on Earth, in the Fire Wars of the early twenty-first century. Despite its age, the thing was still supposed to be in working order.
After several minutes of silence Grady finally set down his pen and looked up at Kagen. He was unusually young for a high officer but his unruly gray hair made him look older than he was. Like all high officers, he was Earth-born; frail and slow before the assault squad troopers from the dense, heavy gravity War Worlds of Wellington and Rommel.
“Report your presence,” Grady said curtly. As always, his lean, pale face mirrored immense boredom.
“Field Officer John Kagen, assault squads, Terran Expeditionary Force.”
Grady nodded, not really listening. He opened one of his desk drawers and extracted a sheet of paper.
“Kagen,” he said, fiddling with the paper, “I think you know why you’re here.” He tapped the paper with his finger. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“Just what it says, Major,” Kagen replied. He tried to shift his weight but the tractor beams held him rigid.
Grady noticed and gestured impatiently. “At rest,” he said. Most of the tractor beams snapped off, leaving Kagen free to move, if only at half his normal speed. He flexed in relief and grinned.
“My term of enlistment is up within two weeks, Major. I don’t plan to reenlist. So I’ve requested transportation to Earth. That’s all there is to it.”
Grady’s eyebrows arched a fraction of an inch but the dark eyes beneath them remained bored.
“Really?” he asked. “You’ve been a soldier for almost twenty years now, Kagen. Why retire? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Kagen shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m getting old. Maybe I’m just getting tired of camp life. It’s all starting to get boring, taking one damn mudhole after another. I want something different. Some excitement.”
Grady nodded. “I see. But I don’t think I agree with you, Kagen.” His voice was soft and persuasive. “I think you’re underselling the T.E.F. There is excitement ahead, if you’ll only give us a chance.” He leaned back in his chair, toying with a pencil he had picked up. “I’ll tell you something, Kagen. You know, we’ve been at war with the Hrangan Empire for nearly three decades now. Direct clashes between us and the enemy have been few and far between up to now. Do you know why?”
“Sure,” Kagen said.
Grady ignored him. “I’ll tell you why,” he continued. “So far each of us has been struggling to consolidate his position by grabbing these little worlds in the border regions. These mudholes, as you call them. But they’re very important mudholes. We need them for bases, for their raw materials, for their industrial capacity, and for the conscript labor they provide. That’s why we try to minimize damage in our campaigns. And that’s why we use psychwar tactics like the howlers. To frighten away as many natives as possible before each attack. To preserve labor.”
“I know all that,” Kagen interrupted with typical Wellington bluntness. “What of it? I didn’t come here for a lecture.”
Grady looked up from the pencil. “No,” he said. “No, you didn’t. So I’ll tell you, Kagen. The prelims are over. It’s time for the main event. There are only a handful of unclaimed worlds left. Soon now, we’ll be coming into direct conflict with the Hrangan Conquest Corps. Within a year we’ll be attacking their bases.”
The major stared at Kagen expectantly, waiting for a reply. When none came, a puzzled look flickered across his face. He leaned forward again.
“Don’t you understand, Kagen?” he asked. “What more excitement could you want? No more fighting these piddling civilians in uniform, with their dirty little atomics and their primitive projectile guns. The Hrangans are a real enemy. Like us, they’ve had a professional army for generations upon generations. They’re soldiers, born and bred. Good ones, too. They’ve got screens and modem weapons. They’ll be foes to give our assault squads a real test.”
“Maybe,” Kagen said doubtfully. “But that kind of excitement isn’t what I had in mind. I’m getting old. I’ve noticed that I’m definitely slower lately—even synthastim isn’t keeping up my speed.”
Grady shook his head. “You’ve got one of the best records in the whole T.E.F., Kagen. You’ve received the Stellar Cross twice and the World Congress Decoration three times. Every com station on Earth carried the story when you saved the landing party on Torego. Why should you doubt your effectiveness now? We’re going to need men like you against the Hrangans. Reenlist.”
“No,” said Kagen emphatically. “The regs say you’re entitled to your pension after twenty years and those medals have earned me a nice bunch of retirement bonuses. Now I want to enjoy them.” He grinned broadly. “As you say, everyone on Earth must know me. I’m a hero. With that reputation, I figure I can have a real screechout.”
Grady frowned and drummed on the desk impatiently. “I know what the regulations say, Kagen. But no one ever really retires—you must know that. Most troopers prefer to stay with the front. That’s their job. That’s what the War Worlds are all about.”
“I don’t really care, Major,” Kagen replied. “I know the regs and I know I have a right to retire on full pension. You can’t stop me.”
Grady considered the statement calmly, his eyes dark with thought.
“All right,” he said after a long pause. “Let’s be reasonable about this. You’ll retire with full pension and bonuses. We’ll set you down on W
ellington in a place of your own. Or Rommel if you like. We’ll make you a youth barracks director—any age group you like. Or a training camp director. With your record you can start right at the top.”
“Uh-uh,” Kagen said firmly. “Not Wellington. Not Rommel. Earth.”
“But why? You were born and raised on Wellington—in one of the hill barracks, I believe. You’ve never seen Earth.”
“True,” said Kagen. “But I’ve seen it in camp telecasts and flicks. I like what I’ve seen. I’ve been reading about Earth a lot lately, too. So now I want to see what it’s like.” He paused, then grinned again. “Let’s just say I want to see what I’ve been fighting for.”
Grady’s frown reflected his displeasure. “I’m from Earth, Kagen,” he said. “I tell you, you won’t like it. You won’t fit in. The gravity is too low—and there are no artificial heavy gravity barracks to take shelter in. Synthastim is illegal, strictly prohibited. But War Worlders need it, so you’ll have to pay exorbitant prices to get the stuff. Earthers aren’t reaction trained, either. They’re a different kind of people. Go back to Wellington. You’ll be among your own kind.”
“Maybe that’s one of the reasons I want Earth,” Kagen said stubbornly. “On Wellington I’m just one of hundreds of old vets. Hell, every one of the troopers who does retire heads back to his old barracks. But on Earth I’ll be a celebrity. Why, I’ll be the fastest, strongest guy on the whole damn planet. That’s got to have some advantages.”
Grady was starting to look agitated. “What about the gravity?” he demanded. “The synthastim?”
“I’ll get used to light gravity after a while, that’s no problem. And I won’t be needing that much speed and endurance, so I figure I can kick the synthastim habit.”
Dreamsongs. Volume I Page 9
