“Well, Howard,” I said, “it’s all pretty dreary, but there’s nothing I can do about it. So take care of yourself and lots of luck in your new home.”
“Wait!” Howard said. “Don’t go wake up yet. I used up ten years’ worth of cigarette rations to get into your dream. You could help me, Tom, and it would help you, too.”
“What are you talking about, Howard?”
“You could write up this story for a magazine. They’d pay you for it. Just mention my name in the story. Even being mentioned by a published writer is worth something in Hell. I think it would give me enough status to get out of this suburb, take the next step, move into a cottage in a place that looks like Cape May in the rain, and I’d get to sort semiprecious stones instead of gravel, and get two channels on the television with an NFL football game every Sunday as well as the baseball game. It’s not much, but from where I’m sitting it looks like Heaven. Tom, say you’ll do it!”
He looked at me imploringly. His time in Hell hadn’t done much for his looks. He was drawn, haggard, strained, nervous, apathetic, anxious, and tired. I suppose that’s how people on the lowest social rungs of Hell always look.
“All right, Howard, I’ll do it. Now, please go back to Hell and have a good trip.”
His face lighted up. “You’ll do it? May Satan smile upon your reviews!” he cried. And then he was gone.
And so I sat down and wrote this story. My original intention was to use it to complete my revenge against Howard. You see, I have written this whole thing without using my brother-in-law’s real name. As far as I’m concerned he can sort gravel in his semidetached house in Hell forever.
That was my first intention. But then I relented. It was a fine revenge, but I couldn’t let myself take it. I think it’s all right to pursue vengeance to the grave, but not beyond. And you may laugh at this, but it’s also my conviction that we living have a duty to do whatever we can to help out the dead.
So this one’s for you, Howard, whose real name is Paul W. Whitman, late of 2244 Seacactus Drive, Miami Beach, Florida. I forgive you for all the bad stuff about Tracy. Maybe she and I would have split up anyway, even without your help. May this mention get you safely to your hotel room and your football game once a week.
And if you happen to see my old high school buddies, Manny Klein, killed in Vietnam, 1969; Sam Taylor, heart attack, Manhattan, 1971; and Ed Moscowitz, mugged in Morningside Heights, 1978, tell them I was asking after them and thus ensuring, I hope, their move to more pleasing surroundings.
TRAITOR’S SAGA
I.
On embarkation day there were a thousand of us who marched down Maccabee Boulevard behind Colonel Bar Kochba to the reviewing stand, where Solomon Gottshaft, the Planetary President of Eretz Perdido, gave us the salute, and told us to go out and show the universe, or whatever part of it happened to be, watching, what sort of stuff Perdido’s Ten Lost Tribes were made of. We proceeded past the enormous stone doors of the New Temple, cheered by the multitudes, and then we were loaded into trucks and taken to Theodor Herzl Spacefield on the edge of our capital city of New Jerusalem. There we were loaded aboard the Fleet destroyer Swiftsure for the short trip to the dreadnought Valley Forge, which waited in geosynchronous orbit above our planet.
The Valley Forge was twelve hundred feet long, displaced well over one hundred thousand tons, and carried a crew of two thousand and eighty. Our hundred men were assigned quarters and canteen privileges, and were given self-locating maps so we could find our way between sleeping quarters, mess hall, exercise area, PX, and recreation hall. Our own officers relayed ship’s instructions: we were to deploy immediately to our assigned sleeping places-which also served as acceleration couches, and strap down for takeoff.
It was a fine moment when the siren sounded and we felt the tingling vibration as the ship’s sub-light converters came on. There was, no sense of motion, but strap-down is traditional, besides sometimes there can be vertigo when first getting underway. We watched our progress on overhead screens, and the readouts made clear to us what was happening.
There was very little physical sense or acceleration, but we knew that Valley Forge was getting up to standard one-quarter speed of light very quickly, powered by the gravity potential of our nearby star, Perdido Primary. Theoretically, this ship could continue accelerating in sublight drive until it approached C, the speed of light, or until the magnetic engines came apart. In practice, the big ships rarely go beyond ½C, and use that mainly for maneuvering around planetary systems. The really long-distance traveling is done in an entirely different mode, by means of the FTL drive. Using FTL, the largest ships can cross the thousand light-year diameter of the great spherical volume of space which contains the more than three hundred Alliance planets in about three standard Terran weeks.
Our trip would take twenty-five days, because we were going to the periphery of Alliance space, the Galactic northwestern frontier, to the planet Target, which the Fleet intelligence services had determined was the home planet of the Khalian raiders. The establishment of a Fleet base recently on the planet Klaxon had paved the way for this final assault on the enemy’s key position at Target, the planet from which the Khalian raiders attacked our shipping and raided the home planets of Alliance members.
For this purpose, the Fleet had gathered together elements from all its far-flung frontiers and guard posts, stripping the interior defenses of the home worlds, timing everything so that one gigantic blow could be struck against the enemy. It was the largest concentration of ships in the Fleet’s thousand-year history, and it seemed impossible that any force could stand up to it; though pessimists pointed out that the fortunes of battle were uncertain, and that if the attack should fail, or be destroyed before it began by the sudden appearance of a rogue black hole or an unseasonable time-storm, we would be delivering the future of humanity into the hands of our enemy, the alien Khalia.
The Combat Troops of the Fleet are made up of levies from the various planet members. The troops served under their own officers who were under the orders of the Fleet high command. At the time we embarked it was still a toss-up which group was going to be picked to lead the commando ground assault onto Target. Among the hundred or more who had volunteered, several of the planetary levies were suitable and trained for the job. The Zyandots of the planet Zyandot II came well recommended, as did the Mahdists of the planet Khartoum IV. The Sons of the Albigensian Heresy, from the planet Janus, were especially eager to lead the assault, because their planet had only been a member of the Alliance of Planets for seven years and they hoped to achieve recognition and status by the doing of an heroic deed. There was intense lobbying in the Chamber of Delegates at Alliance Headquarters on Earth for the privilege: planetary honor was at stake. Less than an hour after we boarded Valley Forge, it was announced that our thousand-man battle group from Perdido had won.
This should not be ascribed to our popularity. We were the compromise candidate. The major planets lost less face if we got the assignment rather than one of their rivals.
I know, I protest too much. It is a universal Jewish tendency. We Jews from Perdido have more than the normal amount of Jewish paranoia. This is due to the uncertainty of our status. Our co-religionists on Earth won’t admit that we are Jews, will not even consider our claim that we are descendents of the ten lost tribes who were kidnapped by aliens and taken from Earth to Perdido.
We pointed out that it was the aliens’ fault that no torahs had been brought on the flight across space, no Talmuds, none of the commentaries of the learned Rabbis, not even Martin Buber’s stories of the Baal Shem Tov. We were aware of the existence of these things due to our racial memories, but we had no knowledge of the things themselves. The Jews of Earth said that since we had no holy books, no prayers, no knowledge of Hebrew, a very feeble grasp of Yiddish, and several more points that I forget, we couldn’t be Jews. We pointed out that although we didn’t have those things—through no fault of our own—we did have the shr
ug, the habit of answering a question with another question, the habit of addressing hypothetical bystanders, the custom of smiting ourselves on the forehead with the flat of the hand when perplexed, the almost racial trigger that forced us to say “Oy, vey!” from time to time, and to reproduce out of alien foodstuffs, and in a climate hardly suited for it, the tastes of dill pickles, stuffed cabbage, varnishkas, pastrami, chopped liver, and stuffed derma with plenty of brown gravy, the latter a triumph of the will when you consider that our entire planet is a steaming rainforest and we had to create. a food like salt herring without ever having tasted one. Interesting, the Jews of Earth said, freaky, even, but hardly proving anything. My God! we cried, smiting ourselves on the forehead with the flat of our hands, if that doesn’t prove anything, what does prove anything?
The matter is still under discussion.
Meanwhile, not even in Israel are we considered Jews. Only on our own planet Perdido, and in some parts of New York City.
That sort of treatment would be enough, you must admit, to make any group a little paranoid and eager to win a measure of glory for itself as a way of taking the pressure off the eternal Jewish question of identification which the Jews of Earth don’t even admit that we, just like them, suffer from.
My name is Judah ben Judah. I am stocky, I have a round head with tight dark curls, as if that mattered. I am thirty-three years of age, and, before my enlistment in the Perdido Expeditionary Force, I was an assistant professor of Jewish Cultural Apologetics at the University of Stetelhaven on Perdido. The reason I was not a full professor has no bearing on this tale, but rests, let me assure you, on the incompetence of the examiners.
I enlisted in our planetary levy and was given the rank of captain and put in command of a ten-man assault squad. We took basic training together at Camp Sabra. After a few weeks we had worked out our basic disagreements and my squad had voted to take my orders unconditionally, at least for the present. Some peoples of the Alliance have found it strange that we Perdidans—to use a neutral term for us—ask each other things rather than give each other orders, and that so entrenched is this custom among us that we stick to it even in our armed forces. Why do we do it that way? I can only say that through trial and error, we have discovered it’s a lot easier to talk matters over with us than to try to tell us what to do. Asking may take a little longer, but it ensures that the job gets done cheerfully and well. And if you’re told no, you just shrug your shoulders, perhaps mutter, “Oy Vey,” and go ask someone else. That’s the way we handle these matters. It seems so logical. Not everyone sees it that way, obviously.
II.
Colonel Bar Kochba called me and the other squad leaders to his quarters soon after the ship was in FTL drive and we were able to move around again. Kochba was a short, bull-necked man with a neatly trimmed white-flecked black beard and the upright bearing of the professional soldier. He was one of the few trained soldiers of field rank on Perdido, having graduated with honors from the Fleet College at Academia on Hellas II. We try to keep a few trained officers ready at all times, even though our planet has never had a real war in the sense of large professional armies and navies fighting it out with their counterparts. Perdido is too isolated and too poor to tempt anyone except the Khalian raiders. We had had more than enough of those, however, and were looking forward to this opportunity of striking back with what we expected would be a crushing blow.
Bar Kochba proceeded in logical fashion. There was going to be a great space battle centered on the planet Target. This battle would be preceded by a commando-style raid on the planet itself. Bar Kochba explained that we would be taken to the surface of the planet in destroyers specially equipped for the mission. By taking out their main armament, the destroyers could mount multiple screens and probably avoid detection long enough to put us on the ground. He outlined the order of battle, issued maps of bur region which were little more than blank spaces with coordinates, since we had not been able to map Target yet. Our attack was to he made in just sixteen hours; now that the assault had been announced, it was imperative to get it moving before the Khalia had time to learn about it through their various allies.
After dismissing us, Bar Kochba asked me to stay behind.
Lighting his large and malodorous pipe, he told me that after reviewing the qualifications of his ten officers, he had decided to ask me to take on the job of Intelligence Officer. I was a little puzzled. “I wasn’t aware that I had any particular qualifications.”
Bat Kochba smiled in his affable way. “I have chosen you,” he said, “because the records show that you are an inquisitive fellow, always poking your nose into matters that do not concern you. That is exactly the sort of fellow we need to do our intelligence work.”
“Just what did you have in mind, Colonel?” I asked. “You’re not expecting me to spy on my fellow soldiers, are you?”
The Colonel was surprised. “What gave you that idea? That’s Counterintelligence and it’s not at all what I’m interested in. I need an intelligence officer to help me find out what to expect on this planet we’re going to, this place called Target.”
I shrugged. “You’ve seen the briefing reports, same as I have. What more is there to say?”
“Nothing, yet. But in sixteen hours—closer to fifteen, now—our battle group spearheads the assault, on Target itself. Once on the ground, I suspect, we’re going to be staying a while. There will be important things to be learned, things that can affect the whole course of the war. I need a man to collect and coordinate all the discoveries made by our battle group.”
I thought it over. It sounded like an important job. “I’ll do it,” I told him.
“That’s fine,” Bar Kochba said. “But let’s get one thing straight. I don’t mean that you, personally, should do it. I’m not sending you out on a spying mission. I’m asking you to collect and coordinate information, and that’s all. Is that understood?”
“Of course, sir,” I said. I saluted and left, and went back to prepare my squad for action. I thought about my new job. And I realized that I had not, in fact, promised. not to do any spying myself. I had merely agreed that I understood that Bar Kochba had asked me not to. I mention that because there was some talk of a court-martial after what actually happened later, after Wyk-Wyk Kingfisher came to our camp.
III.
The Land Combat Forces of the Fleet, drawn as they are from hundreds of planets with differing levels of military technology, to say nothing of local preference and personal taste, always equip themselves, carrying with them a small ordnance department to keep the weapons working and to handle ammunition and repairs. Our group was no different. We had adopted the standard Gushi Plasma Piece, the GPP, as our standard artillery arm. These weapons look like lengths of pipe four feet long by six inches wide. They can fire three five-pound cartridges without reloading, but are limited to line of sight operation. They produce a fireball upon impact with their target, and the energy release is on the order of half a ton of TNT. My squad had four such weapons, more than is usual for ten men, but we were the spearhead.
Aside from that we carried our own weapons as developed on Eretz Perdido. We had several varieties of dart gun, a simple laser pistol, and various types of grenade. And it is with these we were armed when the time came to board the Fleet Destroyer Reliant and go down to the surface of Target below us.
Our descent to the surface of Target was swift, and yet it seemed long indeed, because we didn’t know what awaited us below. It seemed entirely possible that this attack had been betrayed, for it was known that there were spies even among the professionals of the Fleet, men with a taste for money, whose easy consciences allowed them to sell out their own people in the comfortable expectation that the Alliance would win anyhow, so what difference would it make? The Khalia could set a trap for this destroyer as it dropped noiselessly through Target’s atmosphere. Their best strategy would be to let it land without opposition; then destroy it and everyone aboard it in a single ove
rwhelming assault, mounted and carried out before any support could be brought in. Indeed, we couldn’t even ask for help; for the entire operation was to be performed in radio silence.
Treachery, indeed, is the theme of this story of mine, but this is not where it occurred. Our destroyer put down without incident, kissing the dark ground of Target without a sound as we officers urged our men out of the hatches, fast, fast. The black night sky was pocked with distant silent explosions of light and color as the Fleet, high above us in battle formation, opened up a bombardment on the advance scout ships of the Khalia coordinating this action to mask our landing.
The last of our battle group tumbled but, and the destroyer went into lift mode even before the hatches were dogged shut, pushing away from the planet like a gale-driven schooner clawing off a lee shore, hoping to find maneuvering room in space before it was detected and brought down by the Khalian defense batteries.
As for us, once on land, I and the other Captains took command of our squads and by prearrangement led them in different directions. Our first necessity was to disperse, get under cover, make an assessment of the situation, find out what troops were opposing us and in what numbers, and then hit the enemy and hit him hard.
We were hampered at the beginning by a lack of decent maps, because very little mapping of Target had been completed before the assault. We had bought plenty of maps of course—seamen from the merchant fleets often came into contact with aliens who were themselves in contact with the Khalians. They sold their maps to the Fleet, and the Fleet paid them and hoped for the best. As I had feared, what I had in my hand didn’t correspond to what lay around me. So different was the reality from the fanciful documents which the Fleet had given us that I told my men to put the useless things away, since they would only serve to confuse us, and sketch out new maps as they went along.
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