Space Service

by Andre Norton

  “Stories?” said Jordan.

  “Haven’t you heard them?” answered the Intelligence man. “Stories of memory domination—stationmen driven insane by the memories of the men who had the Station before them. Catatonics whose minds have got lost in the past history of the bank, or cases of memory replacement where the stationman has identified himself with the memories and personality of the man who preceded him.”

  “Oh, those,” said Jordan. “I’ve heard them.” He paused, and then, when the other did not go on: “What about them? Are they true?”

  The Intelligence man turned from the half-resealed aperture and faced him squarely, torch in hand.

  “Some,” he said bluntly. “There’s been a few cases like that; although there didn’t have to be. Nobody’s trying to sugar-coat the facts. The memory bank’s nothing but a storehouse connected to you through your silver cap—a gadget to enable you not only to remember everything you ever do at the station, but also everything anybody else who ever ran the Station did. But there’ve been a few impressionable stationmen who’ve let themselves get the notion that the memory bank’s a sort of a coffin with living dead men crawling around inside it. When that happens, there’s trouble.”

  He turned away from Jordan, back to his work.

  “And that’s what you thought was the trouble with me,” said Jordan, speaking to his back.

  The man from Intelligence chuckled—it was an amazingly human sound.

  “In my line, fella,” he said, “we check all possibilities.” He finished his resealing and turned around.

  “No hard feelings?” he said.

  Jordan shook his head. “Of course not.”

  “Then I’ll be getting along.” He bent over and picked up the spool, which had by now neatly wound up all the tape, straightened up and headed for the ramp that led up from the basement to the landing field. Jordan fell into step beside him.

  “You’ve nothing more to do, then?” he asked.

  “Just my reports. But I can write those on the way back.” They went up the ramp and out through the lock on to the field.

  “They did a good job of repairing the battle damage,” he went on, looking around the Station.

  “I guess they did,” said Jordan. The two men paced soberly to the sally port of the Intelligence ship. “Well, so long.”

  “So long,” answered the man from Intelligence, activating the sally port mechanism. The outer lock swung open and he hopped the few feet up to the opening without waiting for the little ladder to wind itself out. “See you in six months.”

  He turned to Jordan and gave him a casual, offhand salute with the hand holding the wind-up spool. Jordan returned it with training school precision. The port swung closed.

  He went back to the master control room and the ritual of seeing the ship off. He stood looking out for a long time after it had vanished, then turned from the panel with a sigh to find himself at last completely alone.

  He looked about the Station. For the next six months this would be his home. Then, for another six months he would be free on leave while the Station was rotated out of the line in its regular order for repair, reconditioning, and improvement.

  If he lived that long.

  The fear, which had been driven a little distance away by his conversation with the man from Intelligence, came back.

  If he lived that long. He stood, bemused.

  Back to his mind with the letter-perfect recall of the memory bank came the words of the other. Catatonic—cases of memory replacement. Memory domination. Had those others, too, had more than they could bear of fear and anticipation?

  And with that thought came a suggestion that coiled like a snake in his mind. That would be a way out. What if they came, the alien invaders, and Thomas Jordan was no longer here to meet them? What if only the catatonic hulk of a man was left? What if they came and a man was here, but that man called himself and knew himself only as—

  Waskewicz!

  “No!” the cry came involuntarily from his lips; and he came to himself with his face contorted and his hands half-extended in front of him in the attitude of one who wards off a ghost. He shook his head to shake the vile suggestion from his brain; and leaned back, panting, against the control panel.

  Not that. Not ever that. He had surprised in himself a weakness that turned him sick with honor. Win or lose; live or die. But as Jordan—not as any other.

  He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. So—it was over now and he was safe. He had caught it in time. He had his warning. Unknown to him—all this time—the seeds of memory domination must have been lying waiting within him. But now he knew they were there, he knew what measures to take. The danger lay in Waskewicz’s memories. He would shut his mind off from them—would fight the Station without the benefit of their experience. The first stationmen on the line had done without the aid of a memory bank and so could he.

  So.

  He had settled it. He flicked on the viewing screens and stood opposite them, very straight and correct in the middle of his Station, looking out at the dots that were his forty-five doggie mechs spread out on guard over a million kilometers of space, looking at the controls that would enable him to throw their blunt, terrible, mechanical bodies into battle with the enemy, looking and waiting, waiting, for the courage that comes from having faced squarely a situation to rise within him and take possession of him, putting an end to all fears and doubtings.

  And he waited so for a long time, but it did not come.

  The weeks went swiftly by; and that was as it should be. He had been told what to expect, during training; and it was as it should be that these first months should be tense ones, with a part of him always stiff and waiting for the alarm bell that would mean a doggie signaling sight of an enemy. It was as it should be that he should pause, suddenly, in the midst of a meal with his fork halfway to his mouth, waiting and expecting momentarily to be summoned; that he should wake unexpectedly in the nighttime and lie rigid and tense, eyes fixed on the shadowy ceiling and listening. Later—they had said in training—after you have become used to the Station, this constant tension will relax and you will be left at ease, with only one little unobtrusive corner of your mind unnoticed but forever alert. This will come with time, they said.

  So he waited for it, waited for the release of the coiled springs inside him and the time when the feel of the Station would be comfortable and friendly about him. When he had first been left alone, he had thought to himself that surely, in his case, the waiting would not be more than a matter of days; then, as the days went by and he still lived in a state of hair-trigger sensitivity, he had given himself, in his own mind, a couple of weeks—then a month.

  But now a month and more than a month had gone without relaxation coming to him; and the strain was beginning to show in nervousness of his hands and the dark circles under his eyes. He found it impossible to sit still either to read, or to listen to the music that was available in the Station library. He roamed restlessly, endlessly checking and rechecking the empty space that his doggies’ viewers revealed.

  For the recollection of Waskewicz as he lay in the burial rocket would not go from him. And that was not as it should be.

  He could, and did, refuse to recall the memories of Waskewicz that he had never experienced; but his own personal recollections were not easy to control and slipped into his mind when he was unaware. All else that he could do to lay the ghost, he had done. He had combed the Station carefully, seeking out the little adjustments and conveniences that a lonely man will make about his home, and removed them, even when the removal meant a loss of personal comfort. He had locked his mind securely to the storehouse of the memory bank, striving to hold himself isolated from the other’s memories until familiarity and association should bring him to the point where he instinctively felt that the Station was his and not the other’s. And, whenever thoughts of Waskewicz entered in spite of all these precautions, he had dismissed them sternly, telling himself
that his predecessor was not worth the considering.

  But the other’s ghost remained, intangible and invulnerable, as if locked in the very metal of the walls and floor and ceiling of the Station; and rising to haunt him with the memories of the training school tales and the ominous words of the man from Intelligence. At such times, when the ghost had seized him, he would stand paralyzed, staring in hypnotic fascination at the screens with their silent mechanical sentinels, or at the cold steel of the memory bank, crouching like some brooding monster, fear feeding on his thoughts—until, with a sudden, wrenching effort of the will, he broke free of the mesmerism and flung himself frantically into the duties of the Station, checking and rechecking his instruments and the space they watched, doing anything and everything to drown his wild emotions in the necessity for attention to duty.

  And eventually he found himself almost hoping for a raid, for the test that would prove him, would lay the ghost, one way or another, once and for all.

  It came at last, as he had known it would, during one of the rare moments when he had forgotten the imminence of danger. He had awakened in his bunk, at the beginning of the arbitrary ten-hour day; and lay there drowsily, comfortably, his thoughts vague and formless, like shadows in the depths of a lazy whirlpool, turning slowly, going no place.

  Then—the alarm!

  Overhead the shouting bell burst into life, jerking him from his bed. Its metal clangor poured out on the air, tumbling from the loudspeakers in every room all over the Station, strident with urgency, pregnant with disaster. It roared, it vibrated, it thundered, until the walls themselves threw it back, seeming to echo in sympathy, acquiring a voice of their own until the room rang—until the Station itself rang like one monster bell, calling him into battle.

  He leaped to his feet and ran to the master control room. On the telltale high on the wall above the viewer screens, the red light of number thirty-eight doggie was flashing ominously. He threw himself onto the operator’s seat before it, slapping one palm hard down on the switch to disconnect the alarm.

  The Station is in contact with the enemy.

  The sudden silence slapped at him, taking his breath away. He gasped and shook his head like a man who has had a glassful of cold water thrown unexpectedly in his face; then plunged his fingers at the keys on the master control board in front of his seat—Up beams. Up detector screen, established now at forty thousand kilometers distance. Switch on communications to Sector Headquarters.

  The transmitter purred. Overhead, the white light flashed as it began to tick off its automatic signal. “Alert! Alert! Further data follows. Will report.”

  Headquarters has been notified by Station.

  Activate viewing screen on doggie number thirty-eight.

  He looked into the activated screen, into the vast arena of space over which the mechanical vision of that doggie mech was ranging. Far and far away at top magnification were five small dots, coming in fast on a course leading ten points below and at an angle of thirty-two degrees to the Station.

  He flicked a key, releasing thirty-eight on proximity fuse control and sending it plunging toward the dots. He scanned the Station area map for the positions of his other mechs. Thirty-nine was missing—in the Station for repair. The rest were available. He checked numbers forty through forty-five and thirty-seven through thirty to rendezvous on collision course with enemy at seventy-five thousand kilometers. Numbers twenty to thirty to rendezvous at fifty thousand kilometers.

  Primary defense has been inaugurated.

  He turned back to the screen. Number thirty-eight, expendable in the interests of gaining information, was plunging towards the ships at top acceleration under strains no living flesh would have been able to endure. But as yet the size and type of the invaders were still hidden by distance. A white light flashed abruptly from the communications panel, announcing that Sector Headquarters was alerted and ready to talk. He cut in audio.

  “Contact. Go ahead, Station J-49C3.”

  “Five ships,” he said. “Beyond identification range. Coming in through thirty-eight at ten point thirty-two.”

  “Acknowledge,” the voice of Headquarters was level, precise, emotionless. “Five ships—thirty-eight—ten—thirty-two. Patrol Twenty, passing through your area at four hours distance, has been notified and will proceed to your station at once, arriving in four hours, plus or minus twenty minutes. Further assistance follows. Will stand by here for your future messages.”

  The white light went out and he turned away from the communications panel. On the screen, the five ships had still not grown to identifiable proportions, but for all practical purposes, the preliminaries were over. He had some fifteen minutes now during which everything that could be done, had been done.

  Primary defense has been completed.

  He turned away from the controls and walked back to the bedroom, where he dressed slowly and meticulously in full black uniform. He straightened his tunic, looking in the mirror, and stood gazing at himself for a long moment. Then, hesitantly, almost as if against his will, he reached out with one hand to a small gray box on a shelf beside the minor, opened it, and took out the silver battle star that the next few hours would entitle him to wear.

  It lay in his palm, the bright metal winking softly up at him under the reflection of the room lights and the small movements of his hand. The little cluster of diamonds in its center sparked and ran the whole gamut of their flashing colors. For several minutes he stood looking at it; then slowly, gently, he shut it back up in its box and went out, back to the control room.

  On the screen, the ships were now large enough to be identified. They were medium-sized vessels, Jordan noticed, of the type used most by the most common species of raiders—that same race which had orphaned him. There could be no doubt about their intentions, as there sometimes was when some odd stranger chanced upon the Frontier, to be regretfully destroyed by men whose orders were to take no chances. No, these were the enemy, the strange, suicidal life form that thrust thousands of attacks yearly against the little human empire, who blew themselves up when captured and wasted a hundred ships for every one that broke through the guarding stations to descend on some unprotected city of an inner planet and loot it of equipment and machinery that the aliens were either unwilling or unable to build for themselves—a contradictory, little-understood and savage race. These five ships would make no attempt to parley.

  But now, doggie number thirty-eight had been spotted and the white exhausts of guided missiles began to streak toward the viewing screen. For a few seconds, the little mech bucked and tossed, dodging, firing defensively, shooting down the missiles as they approached. But it was a hopeless fight against those odds and suddenly one of the streaks expanded to fill the screen with glaring light.

  And the screen went blank. Thirty-eight was gone.

  Suddenly realizing that he should have been covering with observation from one of the doggies further back, Jordan jumped to fill his screens. He brought the view from forty in on the one that thirty-eight had vacated and filled the two flanking screens with the view from thirty-seven on his left and twenty on his right. They showed his first line of defense already gathered at the seventy-five-kilometer rendezvous and the fifty-thousand-kilometer rendezvous still forming.

  The raiders were decelerating now, and on the wall, the telltale for the enemy’s detectors flushed a sudden deep and angry purple as their invisible beams reached out and were baffled by the detector screen he had erected at a distance of forty thousand kilometers in front of the Station. They continued to decelerate, but the blockage of their detector beams had given them the approximate area of his Station; and they corrected course, swinging in until they were no more than two points and ten degrees in error. Jordan, his nervous fingers trembling slightly on the keys, stretched thirty-seven through thirty out in depth and sent forty through forty-five forward on a five-degree sweep to attempt a circling movement.

  The five dark ships of the raiders, recogn
izing his intention, fell out of their single-file approach formation to spread out and take a formation in open echelon. They were already firing on the advancing doggies and tiny streaks of light tattooed the black of space around numbers forty through forty-five.

  Jordan drew a deep and ragged breath and leaned back in his control seat. For the moment there was nothing for his busy fingers to do among the control keys. His thirties must wait until the enemy came to them; since with modern automatic gunnery the body at rest had an advantage over the body in motion. And it would be some minutes before the forties would be in attack position. He fumbled for a cigarette, keeping his eyes on the screens, remembering the caution in the training manuals against relaxation once contact with the enemy had been made.

  But reaction was setting in.

  From the first wild ringing command of the alarm until the present moment, he had reacted automatically, with perfection and precision, as the drills had schooled him, as the training manuals had impressed upon him. The enemy had appeared. He had taken measures for defense against them. All that could have been done had been done; and he knew he had done it properly. And the enemy had done what he had been told they would do.

  He was struck, suddenly, with the deep quivering realization of the truth in the manuals’ predictions. It was so, then. These inimical others, these alien foes, were also bound by the physical laws. They as well as he, could move only within the rules of time and space. They were shorn of their mystery and brought down to his level. Different and awful, they might be, but their capabilities were limited, even as his; and in a combat such as the one now shaping up, their inhumanness was of no account, for the inflexible realities of the universe weighed impartially on him and them alike.

  And with this realization, for the first time, the old remembered fear began to fall away like a discarded garment. A tingle ran through him and he found himself warming to the fight as his forefathers had warmed before him away back to the days when man was young and the tiger roared in the cool, damp jungle-dawn of long ago. The blood-instinct was in him; that and something of the fierce, vengeful joy with which a hunted creature turns at last on its pursuer. He would win. Of course he would win. And in winning he would at one stroke pay off the debt of blood and fear which the enemy had held against him these fifteen years.