Soldier, Ask Not

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Oh, I'll listen," I told her.

  I turned from her. And suddenly, over her shoulder, behind us, below me, small and far off by that entrance to the Index Room by which we had come in, I saw my sister, no longer with our group. I recognized her at that distance only by the pale color of her hair and her height. She was talking to a dark, slim man dressed all in black, whose face I could not make out at that distance, but who stood close to her.

  I was startled and suddenly annoyed. The sight of the thin male figure in black seemed to slap at me like an affront. The very idea that my sister would

  drop behind our group to speak to someone else after begging me to bring her here-speak to someone who was a complete stranger to me, and speak as earnestly as I could see she was speaking, even at this distance, by the tenseness of her figure and the little movements of her hands-seemed to me like a discourtesy amounting to betrayal. After all, she had talked me into coming.

  The hair on the back of my neck rose, a cold wave of anger rose in me. It was ridiculous; at that distance not even the best human ears ever born could have overheard their conversation, but I found myself straining against the enclosing silence of the vast room, trying to make out what it was they could be talking about.

  And then-imperceptibly, but growing rapidly louder-I began to hear. Something.

  Not my sister's voice, or the voice of the stranger, whoever he was. It was some distant, harsh voice of a man speaking in a language a little like Latin, but with dropped vowels and rolled r's that gave his talk a mutter, like the rapid rolling of the summer thunder that accompanies heat lightning. And it grew, not so much louder, as closer-and then I heard another voice, answering it.

  And then another voice. And another, and another and another.

  Roaring, shouting, leaping, like an avalanche, the voices leaped suddenly upon me from every direction, growing wildly greater in number every second, doubling and redoubling-all the voices in all the languages of all the world, all the voices that had ever been in the world-and more than that. More- and more-and more.

  They shouted in my ear, babbling, crying, laughing, cursing, ordering, submitting-but not merging, as such a multitude should, at last into one voiceless, if mighty, thunder like the roar of a waterfall. More and more as they grew, they still remained all separate. I heard each one! Each one of those millions, those billions of men's and women's voices shouted individually in my ears.

  And the tumult lifted me at last as a feather is lifted on the breast of a hurricane, swirling me up and away out of my senses into a raging cataract of unconsciousness.

  Chapter 3

  I remember I did not want to wake up. It seemed to me I had been on a far voyage, that I had been away a long time. But when, at last, reluctantly, I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of the chamber and only Lisa Kant was bending over me. Some of the others in our party had not yet finished turning around to see what had happened to me.

  Lisa was raising my head from the floor.

  "You heard!" she was saying, urgently and low-voiced, almost in my ear. "What did you hear?"

  "Hear?" I shook my head, dazedly, remembering at that, and almost expecting to hear that uncountable horde of voices flooding back in on me. But there was only silence now, and Lisa's question. "Hear?" I said, "-them."

  "Them?"

  I blinked my eyes up at her and abruptly my mind cleared. All at once, I remembered my sister Eileen; and I scrambled to my feet, staring off into the distance at the entrance by which I had seen her standing with the man in black. But the entrance and the space about it was empty. The two of them, together-they were gone.

  I scrambled to my feet. Shaken, battered, torn loose from my roots of self-confidence by that mighty cataract of voices in which I had been plunged and carried away, the mystery and disappearance of my sister shook me now out of all common sense. I did not answer Lisa, but started at a run down the ramp for the entrance where I had last seen Eileen talking to the stranger in black.

  Fast as I was, with my longer legs, Lisa was faster. Even in the blue robes, she was as swift as a track star. She caught up with me, passed me and swung around to bar the entrance as I reached it.

  "Where are you going?" she cried. "You can't leave-just yet! If you heard something, I've got to take you to see Mark Torre himself! He has to talk to anyone who ever hears anything!"

  I hardly heard her.

  "Get out of my way," I muttered, and I pushed her aside, not gently. I plunged on through the entrance into the circular equipment room beyond the entrance. There were technicians at work in their colored smocks, doing incomprehensible things to inconceivable tangles of metal and glass-but no sign of Eileen, or the man in black.

  I raced through the room into the corridor beyond. But that, too, was empty. I ran down the corridor and turned right into the first doorway I came to. From desks and tables a few people, reading and transcribing, looked up at me in wonder, but Eileen and the stranger were not among them. I tried another room and another, all without success.

  At the fifth room, Lisa caught up with me again.

  "Stop!" she said. And this time she took actual hold of me, with a strength that was astonishing for a girl no larger than she was. "Will you stop?-And think for a moment? What's the matter?"

  "Matter!" I shouted. "My sister-" and then I stopped. I checked my tongue. All at once it swept over me how foolish it would sound if I told Lisa the object of my search. A seventeen-year-old girl talking to, and even going off from a group with, someone her older brother does not know, is hardly good reason for a wild chase and a frantic search-at least in this day and age. And I was not of any mind to rehearse for Lisa's benefit the cold unhappiness of our upbringing, Eileen's and mine, in the house of my uncle Mathias.

  I stood silent.

  "You have to come with me," she said urgently after a second. "You don't know how terribly, inconceivably rare it is when someone actually hears something at the Transit Point. You don't know how much it means now to Mark Torre--to Mark Torre, himself-to find someone who's heard!"

  I shook my head numbly. I had no wish to talk to anyone about what I had just been through, and least of all to be examined like some freak experimental specimen.

  "You have to!" repeated Lisa. "It means so much. Not just to Mark, to the whole project. Think! Don't just run off! Think about what you're doing first!"

  The word "think" got through to me. Slowly my mind cleared. It was quite true what she said. I should think instead of running around like someone out of his wits. Eileen and the black-dressed stranger could be in any one of dozens of rooms or corridors-they could even be on their way out of the Project and the Enclave completely. Besides, what would I have said if I had caught up with them, anyway? Demand that the man identify himself and state his intentions toward my sister? It was probably lucky I had not been able to find them.

  Besides, there was something else. I had worked hard to get the contract I had signed three days ago, just out of the University, with the Interstellar News Services. But I had a far way to go yet, to the place of my ambitions. For what I had wanted-so long and so fiercely that it was as if the want was something live with claws and teeth tearing inside me- was freedom. Real freedom, of the kind possessed only by members of planetary governments-and one special group, the working Guild members of the Interstellar News Services. Those workers in the communications field who had signed their oath of nonallegiance and were technically people without a world, in guarantee of the impartiality of the News Services they operated.

  For the inhabited worlds of the human race were split-as they had been split for two hundred years now-into two camps, one which held their populations to ''tight'' contracts and the other who believed in the so-called loose contract. Those on the tight-contract side were the Friendly worlds of Harmony and Association, Newton, Cassida and Venus, and the big new world of Ceta under Tau Ceti. On the loose side were ranged Earth, the Dorsai, the Exotic worlds of Mara and Kultis,
New Earth, Freiland, Mars and the small Catholic world of St. Marie.

  What divided them was a conflict of economic systems-an inheritance of the divided Earth that had originally colonized them. For in our day interplanetary currency was only one thing-and that was the coin of highly trained minds.

  The race was now too big for a single planet to train all of its own specialists, particularly when other worlds produced better. Not the best education Earth or any other world could provide could produce a professional soldier to match those turned out by the Dorsai. There were no physicists like the physicists from Newton, no psychologists like those from the Exotics, no conscript hired troops as cheap and careless of casualty losses as those from Harmony and Association-and so on. Consequently, a world trained one kind or type of professional and traded his services by contract to another world for the contract and services of whatever type of other professional the world needed.

  And the division between the two camps of worlds was stark. On the "loose" worlds a man's contract belonged in part to him; and he could not be sold or traded to another world without his own consent- except in a case of extreme importance or emergency. On the "tight" worlds the individual lived at the orders of his authorities-his contract might be sold or traded at a moment's notice. When this happened, he had only one duty-and that was to go and work where he was ordered.

  So, on all the worlds, there were the non-free and the partly free. On the loose worlds, of which as I say Earth was one, people like myself were partly free. But I wanted full freedom, of the sort only available to me as a Guild member. Once accepted into the Guild, this freedom would be mine. For the contract for my services would belong to the News Services, itself, during the rest of my lifetime.

  No world after that would be able to judge me or sell my services, against my will, to some other planet to which it owed a deficit of trained personnel. It was true that Earth, unlike Newton, Cassida, Ceta and some of the others, was proud of the fact that it had never needed to trade off its university graduates in blocks for people with the special trainings of the younger worlds. But, like all the planets, Earth held the right to do so if it should ever become necessary-and there were plenty of stories of individual instances.

  So, my goal and my hunger for freedom, which the years under the roof of Mathias had nourished in me, could be filled only by acceptance into the News Services. And in spite of my scholastic record, good as it was, that was still a far, hard, chancy goal to reach. I would need to overlook nothing that could help me to it; and it came to me now that refusing to see Mark Torre might well be to throw away a chance at such help.

  "You're right," I said to Lisa. "I'll go and see him. Of course. I'll see him. Where do I go?"

  "I'll take you," she answered. "Just let me phone ahead." She went a few steps away from me and spoke quietly into the small phone on her ring finger. Then she came back and led me off.

  "What about the others?" I asked, suddenly remembering the rest of our party back in the Index Room.

  "I've asked someone else to take them over for the rest of the tour," Lisa answered without looking at me. "This way."

  She led me through a doorway off the hall and into a small light-maze. For a moment this surprised me and then I realized that Mark Torre, like anyone in the public eye constantly, would need protection from possibly dangerous crackpots and cranks. We came out of the maze into a small empty room, and stopped.

  The room moved-in what direction, I could not say-and then stopped.

  "This way," said Lisa again, leading me to one of the walls of the room. At her touch, a section of it folded back and let us into a room furnished like a study, but equipped with a control desk, behind which sat an elderly man. It was Mark Torre, as I had often seen him pictured in the news.

  He was not as old in appearance as his age might have made him appear-he was past eighty at the time-but his face was gray and sick-looking. His clothes sat loosely on his big bones, as if he had weighed more once than he did now. His two really extraordinarily large hands lay limply on the little flat space before the console keys, their gray knuckles swollen and enlarged by what I later learned was an obscure disease of the joints called arthritis.

  He did not get up when we came in, but his voice was surprisingly clear and young when he spoke and his eyes glowed at me with something like scarcely contained joy. Still he made us sit and wait, until after a few minutes another door to the room opened and there came in a middle-aged man from one of the Exotic worlds-an Exotic-born, with penetrating hazel-colored eyes in his smooth, unlined face under close-cropped white hair, and dressed in blue robes like those Lisa was wearing.

  "Mr. Olyn," said Mark Torre, "this is Padma, OutBond from Mara to the St. Louis Enclave. He already knows who you are."

  "How do you do?" I said to Padma. He smiled.

  "An honor to meet you, Tam Olyn," he said and sat down. His light, hazel-colored eyes did not seem to stare at me in any way-and yet, at the same time, they made me uneasy. There was no strangeness about him-that was the trouble. His gaze, his voice, even the way he sat, seemed to imply that he knew me already as well as anyone could, and better than I would want anyone to know me, whom I did not know as well in return.

  For all that I had argued for years against everything my uncle stood for, at that moment I felt the fact of Mathias' bitterness against the peoples of the younger worlds lift its head also inside me, and snarl against the implied superiority in Padma, OutBond from Mara to the Enclave at St. Louis, on Earth. I wrenched my gaze away from him and looked back at the more human, Earth-born eyes of Mark Torre.

  "Now that Padma's here," the old man said, leaning forward eagerly toward me over the keys of his control console, "what was it like? Tell us what you heard!"

  I shook my head, because there was no good way of describing it as it really had been. Billions of voices, speaking at once, and all distinct, are impossible.

  "I heard voices," I said. "All talking at the same time-but separate."

  "Many voices?" asked Padma.

  I had to look at him again.

  "All the voices there are," I heard myself answering. And I tried to describe it. Padma nodded; but, as I talked I looked back at Torre, and saw him sinking into his seat away from me, as if in confusion or disappointment.

  "Only . . . voices?" the old man said, half to himself when I was done.

  "Why?" I asked, pricked into a little anger. "What was I supposed to hear? What do people usually hear?"

  "It's always different," put in the voice of Padma soothingly from the side of my vision. But I would not look at him. I kept my eyes on Mark Torre. "Everyone hears different things."

  I turned to Padma at that.

  "What did you hear?" I challenged. He smiled a little sadly.

  "Nothing, Tam," he said.

  "Only people who are Earth-born have ever heard anything," said Lisa sharply, as if I should know this without needing to be told.

  "You?" I stared at her.

  "Me! Of course not!" she replied. "There's not half a dozen people since the Project started who've ever heard anything."

  "Less than half a dozen?" I echoed.

  "Five," she said. "Mark is one, of course. Of the other four, one is dead and the other three"-she hesitated, staring at me-"weren't fit."

  There was a different note to her voice that I heard now for the first time. But I forgot it entirely as, abruptly, the figures she had mentioned struck home.

  Five people only, in forty years! Like a body blow the message jarred me that what had happened to me in the Index Room was no small thing; and that this moment with Torre and Padma was not small either, for them as well as myself.

  "Oh?" I said; and I looked at Torre. With an effort, I made my voice casual. "What does it mean, then, when someone hears something?"

  He did not answer me directly. Instead he leaned forward with his dark old eyes beginning to shine brilliantly again, and stretched out the fingers of his large ri
ght hand to me.

  "Take hold," he said.

  I reached out in my turn and took his hand, feeling his swollen knuckles under my grasp. He gripped my hand hard and held on, staring at me for a long moment, while slowly the brilliance faded and finally went out; and then he let go, sinking back into his chair as if defeated.

  "Nothing," he said dully, turning to Padma. "Still-nothing. You'd think he'd feel something-or I would."

  "Still," said Padma, quietly, looking at me, "he heard."

  He fastened me to my chair with his hazel-colored Exotic eyes.

  "Mark is disturbed, Tam," he said, "because what you experienced was only voices, with no overburden of message or understanding."

  "What message?" I demanded. "What kind of understanding?''

  "That," said Padma, "you'd have to tell us." His glance was so bright on me that I felt uncomfortable, like a bird, an owl, pinned by a searchlight. I felt the hackles of my anger rising in resentment.

  "What's this all got to do with you, anyway?" I asked.

  He smiled a little.

  "Our Exotic funds," he said, "bear most of the financial support of the Encyclopedia Project. But you must understand, it's not our Project. It's Earth's. We only feel a responsibility toward all work concerned with the understanding of Man by man, himself. Moreover, between our philosophy and Mark's there's a disagreement."

  "Disagreement?" I said. I had a nose for news even then, fresh out of college, and that nose twitched.

  But Padma smiled as if he read my mind.

  "It's nothing new," he said. "A basic disagreement we've had from the start. Put briefly, and somewhat crudely, we on the Exotics believe that Man is improvable. Our friend Mark, here, believes that Earth man-Basic Man-is already improved, but hasn't been able to uncover his improvement yet and use it."