His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  In all the records of the All Earth Union and Colonies-navy, there had probably been no such man as Bartok. Back to the days of the Herkimer scandal there had been a succession of brilliantly proved men in his office, but for resourcefulness and the spy's temperament he had had no equal.

  He would have gone far in the old days; further than any intelligence man now could. Many years ago, when Earth had only a few hundred colonial planets, the news suddenly broke that there was a virtual dictatorship over the navy by the Intelligence Wing. Herkimer, since painted as a scoundrel of the deepest dye, had been merely an exceptionally enthusiastic officer.

  The course his enthusiasm ran included incidentally the elimination of much red tape in the form of unfriendly fleet officers; that he regretted as unfortunate and even tragic. But his mission of expanding Earth's culture and civilization to the stars would not brook interference.

  Classic scholars could scarcely avoid a comparison with the Roman emperor Trajan, who pushed the bounds of the Empire to the absolute limits of the Western world, and created a situation which hastened the fall of Rome by centuries.

  Since the Herkimer affair they had been very careful with the Intelligence Wing. Once it was almost abolished for good; a few years of operation of the fleet practically blind, with no ground laid for them or information of enemy movements, proved that to be impractical. But they did what they could to keep the spies within bounds. It was an actually heartbreaking situation to the executives of the Wing. But you can't keep the voyeur instinct down; that was what they were chosen for and that was how they operated.

  Take this affair on Magdeburg's 83. It was an insignificant outer planet very far away from New Metropole. Yet the filtering of rumors brought it into the brilliant limelight of the Wing. The body of the fleet could not move less than a mile-long battlewagon at one time; the Wing—

  personified by Commander Bartok —dispatched tiny, trim Babe MacNeice. She returned with the information that a hitherto trusted colonial officer had decided to play Napoleon and was secretly fortifying the planet.

  In the last analysis, lives were saved. The single cruiser could send a landing party and take the trusted colonial officer back to Earth for trial; surely a preferable alternative to a minor war with the propaganda-inflamed ophidians that were native to the planet.

  Wing executives did not speak—in private—of their love for the body of the fleet. They held to the stubborn conviction that there was nothing dumber than a flagship commander, nothing less beautiful than a flagship.

  2

  At about that time, things were popping on the lineship Stupendous, two million miles off the orbit of Venus. On it was jammed the entire Headquarters Wing of the All Earth and Colonies navy. In the very heart of the ship, inside almost a cubic mile of defensive and offensive power, was Wing Commander Fitzjames, by virtue of his command Admiral of the Fleet.

  "Not a murmur," he said to his confidential secretary, a man named Voss. "Not a murmur from the crew." He lolled back in his chair and breathed easier under his chestful of medals.

  "They don't know," said Voss. "When they find out—!"

  "Stick to your shorthand, son," snapped the Admiral. "When they find out, they'll keep on carrying out orders very much the way they always have. They're picked men on this ship. Now take this down: General Order to all lineship Commanders. By authority of the Admiral you are empowered to govern any and all citizens and subjects of All Earth. An emergency has arisen which makes it absolutely necessary to eliminate opposition to this program. Your direct superior is your Wing Commander, who is responsible only to ranking members of the Headquarters Wing. A list of proscribed persons will follow."

  The Admiral lit a cigar with an unsteady hand. "Code that," he said.

  "Send it in twenty minutes."

  "Anything else?" asked the secretary. "How about the Wing Commanders? Are you coming clean with them?".

  Fitzjames stared at the metal ceiling. "Take this: Confidential Memorandum to Wing Commanders. From Admiral of the Fleet Fitzjames. You are hereby notified that the Headquarters Wing of the.

  fleet has voted to take over power from the hands of the Executive Committee of All Earth. You are on your honor as officers and gentlemen to support this move by your brothers in arms. You will continue to patrol your regular sectors, having dispatched details to attend to the physical acts of taking power. No planet must be left under a Colonial Governor acting by right of a charter from the Exec All Earth. Details follow. Report to Stupendous immediately in code. We are seizing Venus as a base."

  "Right," said. Voss. "So go ahead and seize it."

  "We're on our way," said the Admiral heavily.

  Depending on where you were to see the affair, the seizing of Venus was either a trivial or a Jovian episode. From space, for example, all there was to see was the bulk of the lineship slipping its length into the clouds above the dawnstar and vanishing from sight. But from the city of Astarte, principal freight port of the planet, it was vastly impressive.

  Above the towers and loading peaks of the yards there appeared the most gigantic of all the spaceships in the universe, covering the town like a roof over its roofs.

  There were a couple of smoke-bombs dropped into the streets and a few old-fashioned radios exploded under the power of the monster ship's sending tubes that announced that the city was taken and would be hostage for the rest of the planet's good behavior. Landing parties went down by lighter ships to establish order and arrange several necktie parties in which the Colonial Governor had the stellar role, minor parts being taken by his subordinates and clerks. Venusian natives were warned off the streets; henceforth none but the Earthborn could show their faces by daylight. Plans were announced to transport the verminous natives to the Darkside District. All this took exactly six hours, Earth time.

  A brief resume of the life of Alexander Hertford III, Captain of the Fleet and Commander of Patrol Wing Twenty-Three, would include many revealing facts relative to the situation of the moment.

  As he lay comfortably sprawled on a divan aboard his lineship Excalibur, a capital fighting vessel of standard offensive and defensive equipment, he was a fine figure of a man in his uniform of purple and gold. The collar was open, which, with his tumbled curls hanging over his brow in the manner of an ancient Irish glib, gave him a dashing, devil-may-care expression. At least Miss Beverly deWinder thought so, for she was smoothing those tumbled curls and smiling maternally.

  Leaving the commander's ship—which was stationed off Rigel—for a moment, we take a brief survey of his career. He was thirty years old, and his grandfather, the first of his name, was also in the Navy. His father was not as bright as his grandfather, but appointments were easily got from the sentimental All Earth Exec, which wished to breed a race of fighting men, true, loyal and hard as nails. Alexander Hertford II just got through Prep Wing and Training Wing by the skin of his teeth, lived on a lineship and died at his post quelling an uprising among the outer planets of Alpha Centauri.

  The third of the name was definitely dull. However, by virtue of the anonymous genius who invented the Auto-Cram and peddled them to students, he got through with what could easily be mistaken for flying colors, won his commission, saw service and was promoted to a Wing Command.

  Life in Prep Wing and Training Wing was Spartan in the extreme.

  Tradition was extensively cultivated; for example, it was legitimate to steal anything edible and criminal to steal anything drinkable. Another of the blunders of the career-molding branch of the Navy was the policy of rigidly excluding females from the lives of the boys and men for the duration of the course. Thus it was no more than natural that after graduating they got their romance in heavy doses.

  The end-product of this was sprawling off Rigel when a discreet tapping sounded on the door of the Commander's lounge.

  "I'll see, sweetie," said Miss deWinder, who was a good-hearted girl.

  She took the slip of paper that poked through the slo
t and carried it to Alexander Hertford III.

  He opened it and read.

  "Damn," said Alexander Hertford III.

  "Wassa matta, sweetie pie? Did bad ol' Admiral sen' sweetie pie away Porn li'l Bevvie-wevvie?"

  Sweetie pie opened a closet whose inner face was a mirror and adjusted his collar and hair. As he cocked his cap at the right fraction of an angle, he said: "Nothing to worry about. You just sit tight. I may not be back for a few days—we're seeing action again." He reread the slip of paper.

  "Damn," he marveled again. "When we used to talk about it around the mess-tables I never thought it'd come in my time. But here it is. Beverly, sweet, the Navy's taking over. Your lover-boy isn't a flying policeman anymore." He buckled on his belt and opened the lap of the handgun holster. There was a look of strain on his dumb, handsome face. "From now on," he said, "your lover-boy is ruler, and no questions asked, over Cosmic Sector Twenty-Three, with full power of life and death."

  Miss deWinder echoed after him, fascinated: "And no questions asked

  …"

  The decode clerk at Intelligence Wing read off the message he had just received and set into English. Working like an automaton, he was grasping its meaning for the first time, though it had been a full quarter-hour's labor to untangle the quadruply alternating cipher. He read; he understood at last; he whistled a long, slow whistle of amazement.

  In agitated tones he snapped at an office girl: "This is for Barty and nobody else. Give it to him and run, because there's going to be an explosion."

  He reread the slip of paper: "—hereby notified that the Headquarters Wing has …" He folded and sealed the slip.

  The office girl stood back a few yards to watch the Commander's face.

  Alternately it registered disgust and amazement as he read and reread the slip. "Scat!" he finally choked at her, with an imperious gesture.

  Alone in his office with Babe MacNeice he shoved the slip across his desk, his face working.

  She read it and looked up, frankly puzzled. "So what?" Babe demanded.

  "It's a general order, memo—whatever you want to call it. Why the skillful simulation of epilepsy?"

  "You don't know," he groaned, burying his head in his hands. "Women, children, imbeciles and men who haven't passed through the Prep and Training Wings. I'd be just like them if I hadn't had the spy kink from birth and been through the Training Section of the Wing I now command. You don't know, Babe, what your typical Navy officer is like.

  "Once for an experiment they tried sending some Rigelians—who are very much like genus homo except that they haven't any internal organs—all highly organized custard inside—to Training. Would those long-headed beauties let them stay? Nope—tradition. It was a school for gentlemen, scholars—by virtue of the Autocram—and Terrestrials exclusively. Things are so bad now that you have to be a direct descendant of a previous student before they admit you. All Earth Execblah! Democratic, but soft-headed and sentimental.

  "When these prize beauties get into power they'll make such a hash of our beautiful colonial system—!" He was nearly weeping.

  Babe MacNeice rose from her chair with gleaming eyes. "Well," she yelled at the man, "don't just sit there! What are you going to do about it?" He looked up. "Yes," she snapped, "I said do. Here you are sitting pretty with a corner on all the brains in the Navy, with the most loyal staff of any commander, and you just snivel about what those imbeciles plan for the future. If you feel so damn broken-up about it why don't you stop them?"

  Bartok was looking at her with amazed eyes. Women, he decided, were wonderful. No false sentiment about them; something about their ugly biological job must make them innate fact-facers. Of course some man would have to find them the facts to face, but neither sex was perfect.

  "Babe," he said wonderingly, "I believe you have it." He sprang to his feet. "Fitzjames," he barked, "and the rest of his crew are going to curse the days they were born when I'm through with them. Now let's get down to brass tacks, kid. I have under me about three thousand first-class Intelligence men, one thousand women. My office staff is four hundred. Lab resources—all my men have private labs; for big-scale work we borrow equipment from the University. Armament, every first-class operative owns a hand-gun and shells. Most of them carry illegal personal electric stunners. Rolling stock—two thousand very good one-man ships that can make it from here to Orion without refueling and about five hundred larger ships of various sizes. All ships unarmed.

  Servicing for the ships is in the hands of the local civilian authorities wherever we land. Good thing that we take fuel like civilian and private ships. Oh, yes—our personnel is scattered pretty widely through the cosmos. But we can call them in any time by the best conference-model communications hookup in space. And that's that."

  "It sounds good, Barty," said the girl. "It sounds very good to me. How about the rest of them?"

  The Wing Commander looked very sick suddenly. "Them," he brooded.

  "Well, to our one division they have twenty-six, each with a flagship of the line.

  They have twenty-six bases—including graving-docks, repair-shops, maintenance crews, fuel, ammunition and what-have-you—and innumerable smaller ships and boats.

  "And, Babe, they have one thing we haven't got at all. Each and every ship in the numbered Patrol Wings of the Navy mounts at least one gun.

  The lineships, of which there are eighty-two, mount as many as a hundred quick-fire repeaters and twenty loading ordnance pieces, each of which could blow a minor planet to hell and gone. They have guns and we have minds."

  The girl rested her chin in her hands. "Brainpower versus fire-power,"

  she brooded. "Winner take all."

  3

  The first clash came two weeks later off Rigel. Alexander Hertford III, Commander of Patrol Wing Twenty-Three, was apprised of the startling facts as he awoke from a night (theoretically) of revelry with Miss deWinder.

  Rubbing the sleep from his baby-blue eyes, he yawned: "Impossible.

  There aren't any capital ships other than those in the Navy. There's some silly mistake. You must have decoded it all wrong."

  "Impossible, Commander," said the orderly respectfully. "And it wasn't sent wrong either. They repeated several times."

  The commander stared at the slip which bore the incredible message from Cruiser DM 2. "As regards orders to pacify star-cluster eight, your district, impossible to proceed. Unrecognizable lineship heavily armed warned us away. When asked for section and command they replied,

  'Section One, Command of Reason.' Instruct. The Commanding Officer, DM 2."

  With one of those steel-spring decisions for which the Navy personnel is famous, he abruptly ordered: "My compliments to what's his name, the pilot and navigator. We're going to relieve DM 2 and see what those asses think they've found."

  In just the time he took to dress and bid Miss deWinder a cheery though strained good morning, the ship was hauling alongside the cruiser. After an exchange of salutations, the commanding officer of the cruiser, frankly angry, yelled at Hertford (over the communications system): "Use your own damned eyes, commander. You can't miss the damned thing—biggest damned ship I ever saw in my damned life!"

  "Captain," said the commander, "you're overwrought. Lie down and we'll look about." He was on what they called the bridge, a vast arc of a room which opened, for effect, on the very hull of the ship. Vast, sweepingly curved plates of lucostruc opened on the deeps of space, though scanner discs would have been structurally sounder.

  Taking an angry turn about the bridge he snapped at the lookout: "Have you found that lunatic's chimera yet?" For, be it known, there is no such thing as blundering on a spaceship. You have to do some very involved calculating to blunder on a sun, and even so luck must be on your side.

  In short, unless this mythical lineship chose to show itself, there wasn't one chance in a thousand thousand of its being located.

  "Can't see any chimera, commander," said the lookout, one str
aining eye glued to a telescope. "But right there's the biggest, meanest fighting ship I've ever struck eyes to." He yielded to the commander, who stared incredulously through the 'scope.

  By God, it was there. By all the twelve planets, so it was. The thing was bigger than the Excalibur, Hertford's ship. It floated very far away and could be spotted only by the superb display of illumination they'd put on, with taunting intent, it seemed to the commander.

  "Battle stations!" he yelled immediately. "Ready full fire-power." The lookout spoke into a mike and stood by.

  "Get in touch with him," snapped the commander. "When you get his wavelength give me the speaker. I'll talk to him direct, whoever he is."

  Through his mind were running confused visions of the glorious old days of piracy, when his grandfather had so nobly fought in a ship a tenth the size of his own, to crush the mighty federation of the gentlemen of fortune. "And," he said aloud, "by God they did it."

  The entire ship was buzzing confusedly with rumor. Each and every one of the crew of a thousand and the marines who numbered half that had his own private theory half an hour after the strange lineship had been sighted. These ranged from the improbably accurate notion that it was a rebel against the Navy who were going to raise some hell, to the equally absurd notion that the commander himself was the rebel and that the Admiral had sent his best ship to punish him. The truth, of course, was too obvious to be guessed by anybody.