Bill, the Galactic Hero

by Harry Harrison

  "Seven inches, seven feet — what difference does it make!" the laundry officer mumbled petulantly as he wrapped a handkerchief around his wounded hand. "You don't expect us to tell the recruits how small the enemy really are, or to explain how they come from a 10G planet. We gotta keep the morale up."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Now that Eager Beager had turned out to be a Chinger spy, Bill felt very much alone. Bowb Brown, who never talked anyway, now talked even less, which meant never, so there was no one that Bill could bitch to. Bowb was the only other fuseman in the compartment who had been in Bill's squad at Camp Leon Trotsky, and all of the new men were very clannish and given to sitting close together and mumbling and throwing suspicious looks over their shoulders if he should come too close. Their only recreation was welding and every offwatch they would break out the welders and weld things to the floor and the next watch, cut them loose again which is about as dim a way of wasting time as there is, but they seemed to enjoy it. So Bill was very much out of things and tried bitching to Eager Beager.

  "Look at the trouble you got me into!" he whined.

  Beager just smiled back, unmoved by the complaint.

  "At least close your head when I'm talking to you," Bill snarled and reached over to slam the top of Eager's head shut. But it didn't do any good. Eager couldn't do anything any more except smile. He had polished his last boot. He just stood there now, he was really very heavy and besides was magnetized to the floor, and the fusetenders hung their dirty shirts and arc welders on him. He stayed there for three watches before someone figured out what to do with him, until finally a squad of MPs came with crowbars and tilted him into a handcar and rolled him away.

  "So long," Bill called out, waving after him, then went back to polishing his boots. "He was a good buddy even if he was a Chinger spy."

  Bowb didn't answer him, and welders wouldn't talk to him and he spent a lot of the time avoiding Reverend Tembo. The grand old lady of the fleet, Fanny Hill, was still in orbit while her engines were being installed. There was very little to do because, in spite of what First Class Spleen had said they had mastered all the intricacies of fusetending in a little less than the prescribed year, in fact it took them something like maybe fifteen minutes. In his free time Bill wandered around the ship, going as far as the MPs who guarded the hatchways would allow him, and even considered going back to see the chaplain so he could have someone to bitch to. But if he timed it wrong he might meet the laundry officer again and that was more than he could face. So he walked through the ship, very much alone, and looked in through the door of a compartment and saw a boot on a bed.

  Bill stopped, frozen, immobile, shocked, rigid, horrified, dismayed, and had to fight for control of his suddenly contracted bladder.

  He knew that boot. He would never forget that boot until the day he died, just as he would never forget his serial number and could say it frontwards or backwards or from the inside out. Every detail of that terrible boot was clear in his memory from the snake-like laces in the repulsive leather of the uppers — said to be made of human skin — to the corrugated stamping-soles tinged with red that could only have been human blood. That boot belonged to Deathwish Drang.

  The boot was attached to a leg and, paralyzed with terror, as unable to control himself as a bird before a snake, he found himself leaning further and further into the compartment as his eyes traced up the leg past the belt to the shirt to the neck upon which rested the face that had featured largely in his nightmares since he had enlisted. The lips moved....

  "Is that you Bill? C'mon in and rest it."

  Bill stumbled in.

  "Have a hunk of candy," Deathwish said, and smiled.

  Reflex drove Bill's fingers into the offered box and set his jaw chewing on the first solid food that had passed his lips in weeks. Saliva spouted from dusty orifices and his stomach gave a preliminary rumble while his thoughts drove maddingly in circles while he tried to figure out what that expression was on Deathwish's face. Lips curved up at the corners behind the tusks, little crinkles on the cheeks. It was hopeless. He could not recognize it.

  "I hear Eager Beager turned out to be a Chinger spy," Deathwish said, closing the box of candy and sliding it under the pillow. "I should have figured that one out myself. I knew there was something very wrong with him, doing his buddies' boots and that crap, but I thought he was just nuts. Should have known better...."

  "Deathwish," Bill said hoarsely, "it can't be, I know — but you are acting like a human being!"

  Deathwish chuckled, not his ripsaw-slicing-human-bone chuckle, but an almost normal one.

  Bill stammered. "But you are a sadist, a pervert, a beast, a creature, a thing, a murderer...."

  "Why, thanks, Bill. That's very nice to hear. I try to do my job to the best of my abilities, but I'm human enough to enjoy a word of praise now and then. Being a murderer is hard to project but I'm glad it got across, even to a recruit as stupid as you were."

  "B-but...aren't you really a..."

  "Easy now!" Deathwish snapped, and there was enough of the old venom and vileness to lower Bill's body temperature six degrees. Then Deathwish smiled again. "Can't blame you, son, for carrying on this way, you being kind of stupid and from a rube planet and having your education retarded by the troopers and all that. But wake up, boy! Military education is far too important a thing to be wasted by allowing amateurs to get involved. If you read some of the things in our college textbooks it would make your blood run cold, yes indeed. Do you realize that in prehistoric times the drill-sergeants or whatever it was they called them, that they were real sadists! The armed forces would let these people with no real knowledge absolutely destroy recruits. Let them learn to hate the service before they learned to fear it, which wrecks hell with discipline. And talk about wasteful! They were always marching someone to death by accident or drowning a squad or nonsense like that. The waste alone would make you cry."

  "Could I ask what you majored in in college?" Bill asked in a very tiny and humble voice.

  "Military Discipline, Spirit-breaking and Method Acting. A rough course, four years, but I graduated Sigma Cum, which is not bad for a boy from a working-class family. I've made a career of the service and that's why I can't understand why the ungrateful bastards went and shipped me out on this crummy can!" He lifted his goldrimmed glasses to flick away a developing tear.

  "You expect gratitude from the service?" Bill asked humbly.

  "No, of course not, how foolish of me. Thanks for jerking me back into line, Bill, you'll make a good trooper. All I expect is criminal indifference which I can take advantage of by working through the Old Boys' Network, bribery, cutting false orders, black-marketing and the other usual things. It's just that I had been doing a good job on you slobs in Camp Leon Trotsky and the least I expected was to be left alone to keep doing it, which was pretty damn stupid of me. I had better get cracking on my transfer now." He slid to his feet and stowed the candy and goldrimmed glasses away in a locked footlocker.

  Bill, who in moments of shock found it hard to adjust instantly, was still bobbing his head and occasionally banging it with the heel of his hand. "Lucky thing," he said, "for your chosen career that you were born deformed — I mean you have such nice teeth."

  "Luck nothing," Deathwish said, plunking one of his projecting tusks, "expensive as hell. Do you know what a gene-mutated, vat-grown, surgically-implanted set of two-inch tusks cost? I bet you don't know! I worked the summer vac for three years to earn enough to buy these — but I tell you they were worth it. The image, that's everything. I studied the old tapes of prehistoric spirit-breakers and in their own crude way they were good. Selected by physical type and low I.Q. of course, but they knew their roles. Bullet heads, shaved clean, with scars, thick jaws, repulsive manners, hot pants, everything. I figured a small investment in the beginning would pay rich dividends in the end. And it was a sacrifice, believe me, you won't see many implanted tusks around! For a lot of reasons. Oh, maybe they
are good for eating tough meat, but what the hell else? Wait until you try kissing your first girl.... Now, get lost Bill, I got things to do. See you around...."

  His last words faded in the distance since Bill's well-conditioned reflexes had carried him down the corridor the instant he had been dismissed. When the spontaneous-terror faded he began to walk with a crafty roll, like a duck with a sprung kneecap, that he thought looked like an old space-sailor's gait. He was beginning to feel a seasoned hand and momentarily laboured under the delusion that he knew more about the troopers than they knew about him. This pathetic misconception was dispelled instantly by the speakers on the ceiling which belched and then grated their nasal voices throughout the ship.

  "Now hear this, the orders direct from the Old Man himself, Captain Zekial, that you all have been waiting to hear. We're heading into action so we are going to have a clean buckle-down fore and aft, stow all loose gear."

  A low, heartfelt groan of pain echoed from every compartment of the immense ship.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was plenty of latrine rumour and scuttlebutt about this first flight of the Fanny Hill but none of it was true. The rumours were planted by undercover MPs and were valueless. About the only thing they could be sure of was that they might be going someplace because they seemed to be getting ready to go someplace. Even Tembo admitted to that as they lashed down fuses in the storeroom.

  "Then again," he added, "we might be doing all this just to fool any spies into thinking we are going someplace when really some other ships are going there."

  "Where?" Bill asked irritably, tying his forefinger into a knot and removing part of the nail when he pulled it free.

  "Why anyplace at all, it doesn't matter." Tembo was undisturbed by anything that did not bear on his faith. "But I do know where you are going, Bill."

  "Where?" Eagerly. A perennial sucker for a rumour.

  "Straight to hell unless you are saved."

  "Not again...." Bill pleaded.

  "Look there," Tembo said temptingly, and projected a heavenly scene with golden gates, clouds and a soft tom-tom beat in the background.

  "Knock off that salvation crap!" First Class Spleen shouted, and the scene vanished.

  Something tugged slightly at Bill's stomach, but he ignored it as being just another of the symptoms sent up continually by his panic-stricken gut which thought it was starving to death and hadn't yet realized that all its marvellous grinding and dissolving machinery had been condemned to a liquid diet. But Tembo stopped work and cocked his head to one side, then poked himself experimentally in the stomach.

  "We're moving," he said positively, "and going interstellar too. They've turned on the star-drive."

  "You mean we are breaking through into sub-space and will soon experience the terrible wrenching at every fibre of our being?"

  "No, they don't use the old sub-space drive anymore because though a lot of ships broke through into sub-space with a fibre-wrenching jerk, none of them have yet broke back out. I read in the Trooper's Times where some mathematician said that there had been a slight error in the equations and that time was different in sub-space, but it was different faster not different slower so that it will be maybe forever before those ships come out."

  "Then we're going into hyper-space?"

  "No such thing."

  "Or we're being dissolved into our component atoms and recorded in the memory of a giant computer who thinks we are somewhere else so there we are?"

  "Wow!" Tembo said, his eyebrows crawling up to his hairline. "For a Zoroastrian farmboy you have some strange ideas! Have you been smoking or drinking something I don't know about?"

  "Tell me!" Bill pleaded. "If it's not one of them — what is it? We're going to have to cross interstellar space to fight the Chingers. How are we going to do it?"

  "It's like this," Tembo looked around to make sure that First Class Spleen was out of sight, then put his cupped hands together to form a ball. "You make believe that my hands are the ship, just floating in space. Then the Bloater Drive is turned on —"

  "The what?"

  "The Bloater Drive. It's called that because it bloats things up. You know, everything is made up of little bitty things called electrons, protons, neutrons, trontrons, things like that, sort of held together by a kind of binding energy. Now if you weaken the energy that holds things together — I forgot to tell you that also they are spinning around all the time like crazy, or maybe you already knew — you weaken the energy and because they are going around so fast all the little pieces start to move away from each other, and the weaker the energy the further apart they move. Are you with me so far?"

  "I think I am, but I'm not sure that I like it."

  "Keep cool. Now — see my hands? As the energy gets weaker the ship gets bigger," he moved his hands further apart. "It gets bigger and bigger until it is as big as a planet, then as big as a sun then a whole stellar system. The Bloater Drive can make us just as big as we want to be, then it's turned the other way and we shrink back to our regular size and there we are."

  "Where are we?"

  "Wherever we want to be," Tembo answered patiently.

  Bill turned away and industriously rubbed shine-o on to a fuse as First Class Spleen sauntered by, a suspicious glint in his eye. As soon as he turned the corner Bill leaned over and hissed at Tembo.

  "How can we be anywhere else than where we started? Getting bigger, getting smaller doesn't get us anyplace."

  "Well, they're pretty tricky with the old Bloater Drive. The way I heard it it's like you take a rubber band and hold one end in each hand. You don't move your left hand but you stretch the band out as far as it will go with your right hand. When you let the band shrink back again you keep your right hand steady and let go with your left. See? You never moved the rubber band, just stretched it and let it snap — but it has moved over. Like our ship is doing now. It's getting bigger, but in one direction. When the nose reaches wherever we are going the stern will be wherever we were. Then we shrink and bango! there we are. And you can get into heaven just that easily, my son, if only..."

  "Preaching on government time, Tembo!" First Class Spleen howled from the other side of the fuserack over which he was looking with a mirror tied to the end of a rod. "I'll have you polishing fuseclips for a year. You've been warned before."

  They tied and polished in silence after that, until the little planet about as big as a tennis ball swam in through the bulkhead. A perfect little planet with tiny icecaps, cold fronts, cloud cover, oceans and the works.

  "What's that?" Bill yiped.

  "Bad navigation," Tembo scowled. "Backlash, the ship is slipping back a little on one end instead of going all the other way. No-no! Don't touch it, it can cause accidents sometimes. That's the planet we just left, Phigerinadon II."

  "My home," Bill sobbed and felt the tears rise as the planet shrank to the size of a marble. "So long, Mom." He waved as the marble shrunk to a mote then vanished.

  After this the journey was uneventful, particularly since they could not feel when they were moving, did not know when they stopped, and had no idea where they were. Though they were sure they had arrived somewhere when they were ordered to strip the lashings from the fuses. The inaction continued for three watches and then the GENERAL QUARTERS alarm sounded. Bill ran with the others, happy for the first time since he had enlisted. All the sacrifices, the hardships would not be in vain. He was seeing action at last against the dirty Chingers.

  They stood in First Position opposite the fuseracks, eyes intent on the red bands on the fuses that were called the fusebands. Through the soles of his boots Bill could feel a faint, distant tremor in the deck.

  "What's that?" he asked Tembo out of the corner of his mouth.

  "Main drive, not the Bloater Drive. Atomic engines. Means we must be manoeuvring, doing something."

  "But what?"

  "Watch them fusebands!" First Class Spleen shouted.

  Bill was beginning to sweat —
then suddenly realized that it was becoming excruciatingly hot. Tembo, without taking his eyes from the fuses, slipped out of his clothes and folded them neatly behind him.

  "Are we allowed to do that?" Bill asked, pulling at his collar. "What's happening?"

  "It's against regulations but you have to strip or cook. Peel, son, or you will die unblessed. We must be going into action because the shields are up. Seventeen force screens, one electromagnetic screen, a double armoured hull and a thin layer of pseudo-living jelly that flows over and seals any openings. With all that stuff there is absolutely no energy loss from the ship, nor any way to get rid of energy. Or heat. With the engines running and everyone sweating it can get pretty hot. Even hotter when the guns fire."

  The temperature stayed high, just at the boundary of tolerability for hours, while they stared at the fusebands. At one point there was a tiny plink that Bill felt through his bare feet on the hot metal rather than heard.

  "And what was that?"

  "Torpedoes being fired."

  "At what?"

  Tembo just shrugged in answer and never let his vigilant gaze stray from the fusebands. Bill writhed with frustration, boredom, heat rash and fatigue for another hour, until the all clear blew and a breath of cool air came in from the ventilators. By the time he had pulled his uniform back on Tembo was gone and he trudged wearily back to his quarters. There was a new mimeographed notice pinned to the bulletin board in the corridor and he bent to read its blurred message.

  FROM: Captain Zekial

  TO: All Personnel

  RE: Recent engagement

  On 23/11-8956 this ship did participate in the destruction by atomic torpedo of the enemy installation 17KL-345 and did in concert with the other vessels of said flotilla RED CRUTCH accomplish its mission, it is thereby hereby authorized that all personnel of this vessel shall attach an Atomic Cluster to the ribbon denoting the Active Duty Unit Engagement Award, or however if this is their first mission of this type they will be authorized to wear the Unit Engagement Award.