by David Drake
“No straw?” our captain asked.
“None, I fear, here. But they'll have aplenty in the village, never doubt it. They lay it in the road to silence the horses’ hoofs when a woman's with child, as I've seen many a time. You'll have a cartload as a gift from me, if you can use that much.” The baron smiled as he said that; he had a friendly face, round and red as an apple. “Now tell me,” (he went on) “how it is to be a floating sword. I always find other men's trades of interest, and it seems to me you follow one of the most fascinating of all. For example, how do you gauge the charge you will make your employer?”
“We have two scales, lord,” Miles began. I had heard all of that before, so I stopped listening. Bracata was next to me at table, so I had all I could do to get something to eat for myself, and I doubt I ever got a taste of the pheasant. By good luck, a couple of lasses—the baron's daughters—had come in, and one of them started curling a lock of Derek's hair around her finger, so that distracted him while he was helping himself to the venison, and Bracata put an arm around the other and warned her of Men. If it had not been for that I would not have had a thing; as it was, I staffed myself on deer's meat until I had to loose my waistband. Flesh of any sort had been a rarity where I came from.
I had thought that the baron might give us beds in the house, but when we had eaten and drunk all we could hold, the white-haired fat man led us out a side door and over to a wattle-walled building full of bunks—I suppose it was kept for the extra laborers needed at harvest. It was not the palace bedroom I had been dreaming of; but it was cleaner than home, and there was a big fireplace down at one end with logs stacked ready by, so it was probably more comfortable for me than a bed in the big house itself would have been.
Clow took out a piece of cherry wood, and started carving a woman in it, and Bracata and Derek lay down to sleep. I made shift to talk to Miles, but he was full of thoughts, sitting on a bench near the hearth and chinking the purse (just like this one, it was) he had gotten from the baron; so I tried to sleep too. But I had had too much to eat to sleep so soon, and since it was still light out, I decided to walk around the villa and try to find somebody to chat with. The front looked too grand for me; I went to the back, thinking to make sure our balloon had suffered no hurt, and perhaps have another look at those mules.
There were three barns behind the house, built of stone up to the height of my waist, and wood above that, and whitewashed. I walked into the nearest of them, not thinking about anything much besides my full belly until a big war horse with a white star on his forehead reached his head out of his stall and nuzzled at my cheek. I reached out and stroked his neck for him the way they like. He nickered, and I turned to have a better look at him. That was when I saw what was in his stall. He was standing on a span or more of the cleanest, yellowest straw I had ever seen. I looked up over my head then, and there was a loft full of it up there.
In a minute or so, I suppose it was, I was back in the building where we were to sleep, shaking Miles by the shoulder and telling him I had found all the straw anyone could ask for.
He did not seem to understand, at first. “Wagon loads of straw, Captain,” I told him. “Why every horse in the place has as much to lay him on as would carry us a hundred leagues.”
“All right,” Miles told me.
“Captain—”
“There's no straw here, Jerr. Not for us. Now be a sensible lad and get some rest.”
“But there is, Captain. I saw it. I can bring you back a helmetful.”
“Come here, Jerr,” he said, and got up and led me outside. I thought he was going to ask me to show him the straw; but instead of going back to where the barns were, he took me away from the house to the top of a grassy knoll. “Look out there, Jerr. Far off. What do you see?”
“Trees,” I said. “There might be a river at the bottom of the valley; then more trees on the other side.”
“Beyond that.”
I looked to the horizon, where he seemed to be pointing. There were little threads of black smoke rising there, looking as thin as spider web at that distance.
“What do you see?”
“Smoke.”
“That's straw burning, Jerr. House-thatch. That's why there's no straw here. Gold, but no straw, because a soldier gets straw only where he isn't welcome. They'll reach the river there by sundown, and I'm told it can be forded at this season. Now do you understand?”
They came that night at moonrise.
Not long after I sold my first Hammer story to Jim Baen, who published it in Galaxy, I read Straw, Gene Wolfe's take on mercenary SF in the same magazine. I muttered, “I'll never be able to write this well.”
I was right about that.
—DAD
Tomb Tapper
James Blish
The distant glare of the atomic explosion had already faded from the sky as McDonough's car whirred away from the blacked-out town of Port Jervis and turned north. He was making fifty m.p.h. on U.S. Route 209 using no lights but his parkers, and if a deer should bolt across the road ahead of him he would never see it until the impact. It was hard enough to see the road.
But he was thinking, not for the first time, of the old joke about the man who tapped train wheels.
He had been doing it, so the story ran, for thirty years. On every working day he would go up and down both sides of every locomotive that pulled into the yards and hit the wheels with a hammer; first the drivers, then the trucks. Each time, he would cock his head, as though listening for something in the sound. On the day of his retirement, he was given a magnificent dinner, as befitted a man with long seniority in the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen—and some body stopped to ask him what he had been tapping for all those years.
He had cocked his head as though listening for something, but evidently nothing came. “I don't know,” he said.
That's me, McDonough thought. I tap tombs, not trains. But what am I listening for?
The speedometer said he was close to the turnoff for the airport, and he pulled the dimmers on. There it was. There was at first nothing to be seen, as the headlights swept along the dirt road, but a wall of darkness deep as all night, faintly edged at the east by the low domed hills of the Neversink valley. Then another pair of lights snapped on behind him, on the main highway, and came jolting after McDonough's car, clear and sharp in the dust clouds he had raised.
He swung the car to a stop beside the airport fence and killed the lights; the other car followed. In the renewed blackness the faint traces of dawn on the hills were wiped out, as though the whole universe had been set back an hour. Then the yellow eye of a flashlight opened in the window of the other car and stared into his face.
He opened the door. “Martinson?” he said tentatively.
“Right here,” the adjutant's voice said. The flashlight's oval spoor swung to the ground. “Anybody else with you?”
“No. You?”
“No. Go ahead and get your equipment out. I'll open up the shack.”
The oval spot of light bobbed across the parking area and came to uneasy rest on the combination padlock which held the door of the operations shack secure. McDonough flipped the dome light of his car on long enough to locate the canvas sling which held the components of his electroencephalograph, and eased the sling out onto the sand.
He had just slammed the car door and taken up the burden when little chinks of light sprang into being in the blind windows of the shack. At the same time, cars came droning out onto the field from the opposite side, four of them, each with its wide-spaced unblinking slits of paired parking lights, and ranked themselves on either side of the landing strip. It would be dawn before long, but if the planes were ready to go before dawn, the cars could light the strip with their brights.
We're fast, McDonough thought, with brief pride. Even the Air Force thinks the Civil Air Patrol is just a bunch of amateurs, but we can put a mission in the air ahead of any other CAP squadron in this county. We can scramble.
Small lumpy figures were running across the field from the parked cars toward the shack. The squadron was scrambling.
“Mac!” Martinson shouted from inside the shack. “Where are you? Get your junk in here and get started!”
McDonough slipped inside the door, and swung his EEG components onto the chart table. Light was pouring into the briefing room from the tiny office, dazzling after the long darkness. In the briefing room the radio blinked a tiny red eye, but the squadron's communications officer hadn't yet arrived to answer it. In the office, Martinson's voice rumbled softly, urgently, and the phone gave him back thin unintelligible noises, like an unteachable parakeet.
Then, suddenly, the adjutant appeared at the office door and peered at McDonough. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “Get that mind reader of yours into the Cub on the double.”
“What's wrong with the Aeronca? It's faster.”
“Water in the gas; she ices up. We'll have to drain the tank. This is a hell of a time to argue.” Martinson jerked open the squealing door which opened into the hangar, his hand groping for the light switch. McDonough followed him, supporting his sling with both hands, his elbows together. Nothing is quite so concentratedly heavy as an electronics chassis with a transformer mounted on it, and four of them make a back-wrenching load.
The adjutant was already hauling the servicing platform across the concrete floor to the cowling of the Piper Cub. “Get your stuff set,” he said. “I'll fuel her up and check the oil.”
“All right. Doesn't look like she needs much gas.”
“Don't you ever stop talkin’? Let's move.”
McDonough lowered his load to the cold floor beside the plane's cabin, feeling a brief flash of resentment. In daily life Martinson was a job printer who couldn't, and didn't, give orders to anybody, not even his wife. Well, those were usually the boys who let rank go to their heads, even in a volunteer outfit. He got to work.
Voices sounded from the shack, and then Andy Persons, the commanding officer, came bounding over the sill, followed by two sleepy-eyed cadets. “What's up?” he shouted. “That you, Martinson?”
“It's me. One of you cadets, pass me up that can. Andy, get the doors open, hey? There's a Russki bomber down north of us, somewhere near Howells. Part of a flight that was making a run on Schenectady.”
“Did they get it?”
“No, they overshot, way over—took out Kingston instead. Stewart Field hit them just as they turned to regroup, and knocked this baby down on the first pass. We're supposed to—”
The rest of the adjutant's reply was lost in a growing, echoing roar, as though they were all standing underneath a vast trestle over which all the railroad trains in the world were crossing at once. The sixty-four-foot organ reeds of jets were being blown in the night zenith above the field— another hunting pack, come from Stewart Field to avenge the hydrogen agony that had been Kingston.
His head still inside the plane's greenhouse, McDonough listened transfixed. Like most CAP officers, he was too old to be a jet pilot, his reflexes too slow, his eyesight too far over the line, his belly muscles too soft to take the five-gravity turns; but now and then he thought about what it might be like to ride one of those flying blowtorches, cruising at six hundred miles an hour before a thin black wake of kerosene fumes, or being followed along the ground at top speed by the double wave-front of the “supersonic bang.” It was a noble notion, almost as fine as that of piloting the one-man Niagara of power that was a rocket fighter.
The noise grew until it seemed certain that the invisible jets were going to bullet directly through the hangar, and then dimmed gradually.
“The usual orders?” Persons shouted up from under the declining roar. “Find the plane, pump the live survivors, pick the corpses’ brains? Who else is up?”
“Nobody,” Martinson said, coming down from the ladder and hauling it clear of the plane. “Middletown squadron's deactivated; Montgomery hasn't got a plane; Newburgh hasn't got a field.”
“Warwick has Group's L-16—”
“They snapped the undercarriage off it last week,” Martinson said with gloomy satisfaction. “It's our baby, as usual. Mac, you got your ghoul-tools all set in there?”
“In a minute,” McDonough said. He was already wearing the Walter goggles, pushed back up on his helmet, and the detector, amplifier, and power pack of the EEG were secure in their frames on the platform behind the Cub's rear seat. The “hair net”—the flexible network of electrodes which he would jam on the head of any dead man whose head had survived the bomber crash—was connected to them and hung in its clips under the seat, the leads strung to avoid fouling the plane's exposed control cables. Nothing remained to do now but to secure the frequency analyzer, which was the heaviest of the units and had to be bolted down just forward of the rear joystick so that its weight would not shift in flight. If the apparatus didn't have to be collimated after every flight, it could be left in the plane—but it did, and that was that.
“O.K.,” he said, pulling his head out of the greenhouse. He was trembling slightly. These tomb-tapping expeditions were hard on the nerves. No matter how much training in the art of reading a dead mind you may have had, the actual experience is different, and cannot be duplicated from the long-stored corpses of the laboratory. The newly dead brain is an inferno, almost by definition.
“Good,” Persons said. “Martinson, you'll pilot. Mac, keep on the air; we're going to refuel the Airoknocker and get it up by ten o'clock if we can. In any case we'll feed you any spottings we get from the Air Force as fast as they come in. Martinson, refuel at Montgomery if you have to; don't waste time coming back here. Got it?”
“Roger,” Martinson said, scrambling into the front seat and buckling his safety belt. McDonough put his foot hastily into the stirrup and swung into the back seat.
“Cadets!” Persons said. “Pull chocks! Roll ‘er!”
Characteristically, Persons himself did the heavy work of lifting and swinging the tail. The Cub bumped off the apron and out on the grass into the brightening morning.
“Switch off!” the cadet at the nose called. “Gas! Brakes!”
“Switch off, brakes,” Martinson called back. “Mac, where to? Got any ideas?”
While McDonough thought about it, the cadet pulled the prop backwards through four turns. “Brakes! Contact!”
“Let's try up around the Otisville tunnel. If they were knocked down over Howells, they stood a good chance to wind up on the side of that mountain.”
Martinson nodded and reached a gloved hand over his head. “Contact!” he shouted, and turned the switch. The cadet swung the prop, and the engine barked and roared; at McDonough's left, the duplicate throttle slid forward slightly as the pilot “caught” the engine. McDonough buttoned up the cabin, and then the plane began to roll toward the far, dim edge of the grassy field.
The sky got brighter. They were off again; to tap on another man's tomb, and ask of the dim voice inside it what memories it had left unspoken when it had died.
The Civil Air Patrol is, and has been since 1941, an auxiliary of the United States Air Force, active in coastal patrol and in air-sea rescue work. By 1954—when its ranks totaled more than eighty thousand men and women, about fifteen thousand of them licensed pilots—the Air Force had nerved itself up to designating CAP as its Air Intelligence arm, with the job of locating downed enemy planes and radioing back information of military importance.
Aerial search is primarily the task of planes which can fly low and slow. Air Intelligence requires speed, since the kind of tactical information an enemy wreck may offer can grow cold within a few hours. The CAP's planes, most of them single-engine, priv
ate-flying models, had already been proven ideal aerial search instruments; the CAP's radio net, with its more than seventy-five hundred fixed, mobile and airborne stations, was more than fast enough to get information to wherever it was needed while it was still hot.
But the expected enemy, after all, was Russia; and how many civilians, even those who know how to fly, navigate, or operate a radio transmitter, could ask anyone an intelligent question in Russian, let alone understand the answer?
It was the astonishingly rapid development of electrical methods for probing the brain which provided the answer—in particular the development, in the late fifties, of flicker-stimulus aimed at the visual memory. Abruptly, EEG technicians no longer needed to use language at all to probe the brain for visual images, and read them; they did not even need to know how their apparatus worked, let alone the brain. A few moments of flicker into the subject's eyes, on a frequency chosen from a table, and the images would come swarming into the operator's toposcope goggles—the frequency chosen without the slightest basic knowledge of electrophysiology, as a woman choosing an ingredient from a cookbook is ignorant of—and indifferent to—the chemistry involved in the choice.
It was that engineering discovery which put tomb-tappers into the back seats of the CAP's putt-putts when the war finally began—for the images in the toposcope goggles did not stop when the brain died.
The world at dawn, as McDonough saw it from three thousand feet, was a world of long sculptured shadows, almost as motionless and three-dimensional as a lunar landscape near the daylight terminator. The air was very quiet, and the Cub droned as gently through the blue haze as any bee, gaining altitude above the field in a series of wide climbing turns. At the last turn the plane wheeled south over a farm owned by someone Martinson knew, a man already turning his acres from the seat of his tractor, and Martinson waggled the plane's wings at him and got back a wave like the quivering of an insect's antenna. It was all deceptively normal.