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 link. 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 riddled 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.
The Last Man Left in the Bar
[Infinity Science Fiction, October 1957]
You know him, Joe—or Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben, whatever your deceitful, cheaply genial name may be. And do not lie to yourself, Gentle Reader; you know him too.
A loner, he was.
You did not notice him when he slipped in; you only knew by his aggrieved air when he (finally) caught your eye and self-consciously said "Shot of Red Top and a beer" that he'd ruffle your working day. (Six at night until two in the morning is a day? But ah, the horrible alternative is to work for a living.)
Shot of Red Top and a beer at 8:35.
And unbeknownst to him, Gentle Reader, in the garage up the street the two contrivers of his dilemma conspired; the breaths of tall dark stooped cadaverous Galardo and the mouse-eyed lassie mingled.
"Hyii shall be a religion-isst," he instructed her.
"I know the role," she squeaked and quoted: " 'Woe to the day on which I was born into the world! Woe to the womb which bare me! Woe to the bowels which admitted me! Woe to the breasts which suckled me! Woe to the feet upon which I sat and rested! Woe to the hands which carried me and reared me until I grew! Woe to my tongue and my lips which have brought forth and spoken vanity, detraction, falsehood, ignorance, derision, idle tales, craft and hypocrisy! Woe to mine eyes which have looked upon scandalous things! Woe to mine ears which have delighted in the words of slanderers! Woe to my hands which have seized what did not of right belong to them! Woe to my belly and my bowels which have lusted after food unlawful to be eaten! Woe to my throat which like a fire has consumed all that it found!'"
He sobbed with the beauty of it and nodded at last, tears hanging in his eyes: "Yess, that religion. It iss one of my fave-o-ritts."
She was carried away. "I can do others. Oh, I can do others. I c$n do Mithras, and Ms, and Marduk, and Eddyism and Billsword and Pealing and Uranium, both orthodox and reformed."
"Mithras, Isis, and Marduk are long gone and the resst are ss-till tii come. Listen tii your master, dii not chat-ter, and we shall an artwork make of which there will be talk under the green sky until all food is eaten."
Meanwhile, Gentle Reader, the loner listened. To his left strong silent sinewy men in fellowship, the builders, the doers, the darers: "So I told the foreman where he should put his Bullard. I told him I run a Warner and Swasey, I run a Warner and Swasey good, I never even seen a Bullard up close in my life, and where he should put it. I know how to run a Warner and Swasey and why should he take me off a Warner and Swasey I know how to run and put me on a Bullard and where he should put it ain't I right?"
"Absolutely."
To his right the clear-eyed virtuous matrons, the steadfast, the true-seeing, the loving-kind: "Oh, I don't know what I want, what do you want? I'm a Scotch drinker really but I don't feel like Scotch but if I come home with Muscatel on my breath Eddie calls me a wino and laughs his head off. I don't know what I want. What do you want?"
In the box above the bar the rollicking raster raced.
VIDEO
Gampa smashes bottle
over the head of Bibby.
Bibby spits out water.
AUDIO Gampa: Young whippersnapper!
Bibby: Next time put some flavoring in it, Gramps!
Gampa picks up sugar bowl and smashes it over Bibby's head. Bibby licks sugar from face.
Bibby: My, that's better! But what of Naughty Roger and his attempted kidnapping of Sis to extort the secret of the Q-bomb?
cut to Limbo Shot of Reel-Rye bottle.
Announcer: Yes, kiddies! What of Roger?
But first a word from the makers of Reel-Rye, that happy syrup that gives your milk grown-up flavor! YES! Grown-up flavor!
Shot of Red Top and a beer. At 8:50.
In his own un-secret heart: Steady, boy. You've got to think this out.
Nothing impossible about it, no reason to settle for a stalemate; just a little time to think it out. Galardo said the Black Chapter would accept a token submission, let me return the Seal, and that would be that. But I mustn't count on that as a datum; he lied to me about the Serpentists.
Token submission sounds right; they go in big for symbolism. Maybe because they're so stone-broke, like the Japs. Drinking a cup of tea, they gussie it all up until it's a religion; that's the way you squeeze nourishment out of poverty-Skip the Japs. Think. He lied to me about the Serpentists. The big thing to remember is, I have the Chapter Seal and they need it back, or think they do. All you need's a little time to think things through, place where he won't dare jump you and grab the Seal. And this is it. "Joe. Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben, whoever you are. Hit me again." Joe—Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben?—tilts the amber bottle quietly; the liquid's level rises and crowns the little glass with a convex meniscus.
He turns off the stream with an easy roll of the wrist. The suntan line of neon tubing at the bar back twinkles off the curve of surface tension, the placid whiskey, the frothy beer. At 9:05.
To his left: "So Finkelstein finally meets Goldberg in the garment center and he grabs him like this by the lapel, and he yells, 'You louse, you rat, you no-good, what's this about you running around with my wife? I ought to—I ought to—say, you call this a button-hole?'"
Restrained and apprehensive laughter; Catholic, Protestant, Jew (choice of one), what's the difference I always say.
Did they have a Jewish Question still, or was all smoothed and troweled and interfaithed and brotherhoodooed—
Wait. Your formulation implies that they're in the future, and you have no proof of that. Think straighter; you don't know where they are, or when they are, or who they are. You do know that you walked into Big Maggie's resonance chamber to change the target, experimental indium for old reliable zinc
and
"Bartender," in a controlled and formal voice. Shot of Red Top and a beer at 9:09, the hand vibrating with remembrance of a dirty-green el Greco sky which might be Brookhaven's heavens a million years either way from now, or one second sideways, or (bow to Method and formally exhaust the possibilities) a hallucination. The Seal snatched from the greenlit rock altar could be a blank washer, a wheel from a toy truck, or the screw top from a jar of shaving cream but for the fact that it wasn't.
It was the Seal.
So: they began seeping through after that. The Chapter wanted it back.
The Serpentists wanted it, period. Galardo had started by bargaining and wound up by threatening, but how could you do anything but laugh at his best offer, a rusty five-pound spur gear with a worn keyway and three teeth missing? His threats were richer than his
bribes; they culminated with The Century of Flame. "Faith, father, it doesn't scare me at all, at all; sure, no man could stand it." Subjective-objective (How you used to sling them around!), and Master Newton's billiard-table similes dissolve into sense impressions of pointer readings as you learn your trade, but Galardo had scared hell out of you, or into you, with The Century of Flame.
But you had the Seal of the Chapter and you had time to think, while on the screen above the bar:
AUDIO
VIDEO
Paul: Stop, you fool!
Long shot down steep, cobble-stoned French village street. Pi-erre darts out of alley in middle distance, looks wildly around, and runs toward camera, pistol in hand. Annette and Paul appear from same alley and dash after him.
Pierre: A fool, am I?
Cut to Cu of Pierre's face; beard stubble and sweat.
Annette: Darling!
Cut to long shot; Pierre aims and fires; Paul grabs his left shoulder and falls.
Cut to Paul.
two-shot, Annette and Paul: Don't mind me. Take my
gun—after him. He's a mad dog, I tell you!
Dolly back.
Annette takes his pistol.
Annette stands; we see her aim down at Paul, out of the picture. Then we dolly in to a cm of her head; sheas smiling triumphantly.
A hand holding a pistol enters the cm; the pistol muzzle touches Annette's neck.
Dolly back to middle shot. Hark-rider stands behind Annette as Paul gets up briskly and takes the pistol from her hand.
Annette: This, my dear, is as good a time as any to drop my little masquerade. Are you American agents really so stupid that you never thought I might be—a plant, as you call it?
Harkrider: Golkov.
Sound: click of cocking pistol.
Drop it, Madame
Paul: No, Madame Golkov; we American agents were not really so stupid. Wish I could say the same for—your people. Pierre Tourneur was a plant, I am glad to say; otherwise he would not have missed me.
He is one of the best pistol shots hi Counterintel-ligence.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 77
