The Outposter

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Most people back on Earth don't," said Mark.

  "But"—her hand went to the alien trinket at her throat, then dropped away—"it's all so unbelievable, too. I never would have believed someone like Jarl Rakkal would end up being lotteried, for one thing."

  "Was he a man who was supposed to have an exemption?"

  "No, but somehow it didn't seem as if it could happen to someone on top of the world, like him."

  "It usually doesn't," said Mark.

  "That's what I mean," she went on inno­cently. "Nearly everybody who's important has exemption. And most of the people Dad knew were men in the armed services, and of course that gave them automatic exemption as long as they stayed in a career quota of years. And their wives had deferments—"

  She reached for the alien cube at her throat again.

  "And then," she said, "suddenly nobody seems safe from the lottery anymore, not even me."

  He looked down at her profile as they walked together.

  "You won't be eligible until you're twenty-five, and not then if you're still in school or training for a career that might produce ex­emption."

  She shook her head—at what, it was not quite clear.

  "The colonists," she said suddenly. "Where are they?"

  "The colonists on this ship, you mean?" Mark answered. "With the other cargo. In the hold section, aft."

  "Twelve-hundred people—back there." Her fingers twisted the chain to the cube. "I'd like to see them."

  "They don't let passengers into the cargo section," Mark said. "A safety measure."

  "I know. Dad told me." She turned another corner, and now they were headed down a short corridor at the end of which stood a heavy fire door with two Navy enlisted men wearing guard armbands and side arms and carrying rifles. "He said only ship's personnel could get in."

  "That's right."

  "But—" She looked at him suddenly and caught him studying her. "Outposters—like you—they can go in to see if they want to pick any of the colonists for their own stations. That's true, isn't it?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Don't look so grim. I just thought..." She hesitated. "You could take me in if you wanted to."

  So, he thought, it was this she was after. He felt oddly disappointed to discover it was something so small. He answered brusquely.

  "I don't want to."

  "Please—" She stopped suddenly, so that he was forced to stop also. She turned to him, taking hold of his right arm persuasively. His left hand came across, swiftly but not rough­ly, and slid its fingers under hers, breaking their grip.

  "Gun arm," he told her. "Never do that."

  For a moment she merely stood staring at him, her empty hand still held out towards him, her face pale, her eyes wide.

  "Please," she said. "I want to see Jarl. I have to see Jarl!"

  "Jarl?"

  "Jarl Rakkal. The man I just talked about." She stared at him. "The man you stopped by kicking him into the air, out by the landing stairs when we were coming aboard!"

  "That's right," Mark said. "I remember. You did call him Jarl Rakkal. What is he—an old friend of yours?" He made his voice harsh. "Because if that's it, you'd probably be kinder to him, and yourself too, not to try to see him now."

  "No, not an old friend," she said, looking up at him, still appealingly. "Oh, we know each other, of course. You keep running into the same people at parties and things. But I can't help feeling for anyone like him—I mean he had so much. He was so much. And now he's lost everything."

  "So have they all," said Mark.

  "Yes, but I don't know them all!" she said swiftly. "I do know him. It isn't just because he's Jarl Rakkal, don't you see? It's because he's somebody I know. I can't just forget he's up there, as part of the... cargo. I have to at least try to do something. See him, anyway. Ask him if there isn't some way I can help, some little thing I can do for him ..."

  Her voice ran down and her shoulders sagged. She looked down at the floor.

  "But," she said emptily, "you won't take me in."

  Yes, thought Mark, looking at her, putting his own hard thoughts against the feeling she seemed to be able to evoke in him, she was un­doubtedly clever at getting what she wanted. But there were things he wanted too—things she could not suspect he was after.

  "Yes," he said. "On second thoughts, maybe I will take you in. You interest me in the man. I'd like to have another look at him myself."

  Chapter Four

  He went forward toward the two guards. She hurried to catch up with him.

  "How are they?" he asked the older of the two, a junior petty officer in his mid-thirties.

  "Quiet," said the petty officer. "We lost twenty-eight right after lift-off, but we haven't lost one since." He caught sight of the expres­sion on Ulla's face. "Sorry, miss, but it's always like that. It's just after lift-off, when they finally realize nothing's going to stop their going after all, that a lot of them just give up."

  "They kill themselves?" Ulla looked sick. "You let them?"

  "Just a few—I mean most of the ones we lose just sort of give up and die," said the petty officer. He turned to Mark. "Isn't that right, Outposter? There's nothing we could do even if we wanted to."

  "But the others—" she said.

  "These men are under orders to leave the others alone," said Mark. "There's no point forcing people to go on living when they don't want to. If you kept them alive now, they'd die shortly after they got to the Colonies, anyway. What's the cycle inside now, guard? Sleep or wake."

  "Wake cycle has about another half hour to go," answered the petty officer.

  "Get their records," said Mark. "I'd like to look them over."

  "Yes, sir."

  The petty officer turned to open a panel in the corridor wall and take out a small, brown microfilm box with a viewer screen on its top surface. He handed this to Mark. The other guard was already unlatching the heavy metal dogs locking the fire door. They came loose one by one with soft thumping sounds as they swung back against the sound-absorbent material of the corridor walls. As the last dog dropped loose, the guard swung the door open and the guard who had handed Mark the record file box lifted his rifle to cover the entrance as Mark stepped into it. Ulla pressed hastily in behind him.

  "Just a minute, miss." The other guard put his arm across the doorway. "No passengers allowed. I'm sorry."

  Mark looked back over his shoulder.

  "Tell them who you are," he said to Ulla.

  "Ulla Showell," she said. "My father's Ad­miral-General Jaseth Showell."

  "And she'll be under my protection inside there," said Mark. "All right?"

  The guard hesitated, then dropped his arms and stood back out of the way.

  "Good," said Mark. "Lock the door behind us, then. One of you had better come in and cover us from just inside."

  "Yes, sir."

  The petty officer, with his rifle at ready, followed as Mark and Ulla stepped through the door into the vast, brightly lighted section of the ship. They stood at the top of a flight of uncarpeted, green-painted metal stairs, look­ing down into a long dormitory of double-decker bunks ranked side by side in eight long lines parallel to one another, under a ceiling eighty feet in height. Broad aisles between the lines contrasted with the closeness of the double bunks, which had barely five feet of space between them—just enough so that from the high landing where Mark and Ulla stood, they could see down into the spaces between each pair of bunks, right to the space between the last pair of bunks at the far end of the dormitory, where a ceiling-high metal wall put an end to further space.

  The top quarter of that wall was taken up by a sign. It was not a temporary sign but a permanent fixture built out from the metal of the wall itself. Its three words were spelled out in letters ten feet high and two feet wide, and shone down on the colonists' area with a light of their own.

  ADAPT—OR DIE

  Behind Mark, Ulla, and the petty officer the door by which they had entered clashed cl
osed again. There was no soundproofing on this side of it, and the noise of its closing roared and echoed through the colonists' space aboard the Wombat.

  The sound brought all eyes from below up to the three of them. Men and women, indiscriminately assigned to bunks according to their lottery numbers, looked up from where they stood, sat, or lay, forty feet below, to stare at the intruders from a higher existence they all had once shared equally. Ulla hesitated under the impact of their eyes, but Mark began to descend the open circular staircase leading down to the dormitory floor. After a second she followed.

  Most of the conversations below had ceased with the sound of the closing door, but as they went down the circular stairs, the talk picked up gradually until it was a monotonous buzz, echoing steadily below the high, bare-metal ceiling. Before they reached the floor, even the clang of their feet on the stair treads was muffled by the drone of it; which seemed to hang endlessly on the slightly disinfectant-smelling air, like the toneless humming of a man locked and idle in a prison cell.

  At the foot of the stairs were two lavatory doors, marked for the different sexes. Mark rapped sharply on each one.

  "Back to your bunks, please!" he called.

  Taking the records file in his left hand, he went to the aisle between the two lines and began to move down the aisle, glancing at each colonist in turn and checking the records file of his or her personal history, Ulla followed silently behind him.

  Conversations that had begun as the two of them descended the stairs died once more as

  Mark's eyes came upon the talkers, so that he and Ulla moved in a little traveling circle of silence. For the most part he merely glanced once at a colonist, then at the record file, and moved on to the next individual without a word. But halfway down the aisle he stopped before a middle-aged woman seated on a lower bunk of the row against the wall.

  "Position astrophysics?" he asked.

  She looked up at him with a grey, lined face in sharp contrast to the black wig she wore.

  "That was my husband," she said wearily. "He was a positions officer on one of the Bea-grans ships—that's one of the large civilian space shippers."

  "But you know something about position calculation?"

  "He taught me some," she said. "I had a doctorate in mathematics. It was easy, and when he was away on trips I could plot his probable position shifts for myself and guess pretty close to where he'd be at any given time. It was just something I did when he was away."

  Mark nodded. He went down the line.

  "You might talk to me," said a voice.

  He stopped and looked to his left. Seated cross-legged on an upper bunk was a childlike figure.

  "I'm Lily Betaugh," it said. "I was a full professor of philosophy at Belgrade, and I'll do anything to make the best of my situation."

  Mark regarded her. Seated on the upper bunk, her face was a little above his, and he was close enough so that he could see the faint marks of beginning crow's-feet at the corners of the eyes in the childishly round face.

  "What do you know about the Meda V'Dan?" he asked.

  "Very little," Lily said. "I don't think any human knows much, except that they trade with us and with the Unknown Races of aliens farther in toward Galactic Centre. If they've got a written philosophy, I don't know about it, and that makes me doubt their claim that they're more advanced than we are."

  "A lot of the technology's more advanced."

  "Stone Age savages," she said, "can fire plasma rifles. But being able to use and being able to build are two different things."

  Mark looked at her curiously for a moment.

  "Perhaps," he said. He moved on.

  Ulla followed him as he worked his way down one aisle and up the next. Every so often he stopped to question one of the colonists, usually about some particular skill of know­ledge they were recorded as possessing. He talked to a number of men and women who had picked up mechanical skills as the result of some hobby or other, an industrial chemist, a bookkeeper, two men and one woman whose avocations had been gourmet cookery, a male ballet dancer, and a brown, wiry little man whose hobby had been butterfly collect­ing. The only one, however, to whom he held out any hope of being chosen for his colony was a man named Orag Spal, who had been a Marine non-commissioned gun-control officer for twenty-three years before a dishonourable discharge for theft cast him out of the protec­tion of the armed services, three years short of the retirement that would have ensured his lifetime exemption from the lottery.

  "You could never be an outposter," Mark said to Spal bluntly. "We wouldn't have you if you could. But you still can be the next thing to it if you're willing to work. How about it?"

  "I'm willing," said Spal. He lay at full length on a lower bunk, a short, thick-shoul­dered man with hair only starting to grey. "I'll give you as much as I've got."

  "All right," said Mark. He pressed a button on the records file that marked Spal's dossier. "I've punched you for my station. You may have to go to the general yards on Garnera Six with the rest when the ship lands, but eventu­ally you'll come to me."

  He went on. And in due time he came to Jarl Rakkal.

  Jarl, like the Marine, was lying on his back on a lower bunk when they came to him. Unlike Spal, the big man's frame filled the bunk to overflowing and his dark blue boots rested with their ankles on the foot bar on his bunk, the feet and sole projecting into the aisles. The bunk seemed doll-bed sized be­neath him. Ulla pushed past Mark to go to the head of the lower bunk and Jarl shifted his wide shoulders aside to make a narrow space on the bunk's edge.

  "Ulla Showell!" he said. "Sit down."

  "Hello, Jarl," she said softly, accepting his invitation. He looked past her to Mark, stand­ing at the foot of the bunk with the records file box in his hand.

  "Outposter, sir," Jarl said, smiling a little. "You're a good man. I came close to caving in your chest outside the ship there, sir."

  "Jarl!" said Ulla. "His name is Mark Ten Roos. You don't have to call him sir."

  "I might as well start getting used to it, though," Jarl said. He lifted his eyebrows at Mark. "Shouldn't I?"

  "It's not going to make any difference," Mark said.

  "Isn't it?" Jarl said. "Then I'll drop the sir for the moment, Mr. Ten Roos. Any time you change your mind, let me know."

  "Jarl!" Ulla looked unhappy. "It's not natu­ral for you to be like this."

  "I'm not being like anything, honey-girl," said Jarl, looking at her. The sound of the upper-class pet name jarred on Mark's ears. "I'm not being like anything at all. I'm just being what I actually am now—a colonist. I've got a few more brains than to waste any emo­tion on the past, now that it's gone for good. I'm just out to make the most of the future."

  "You can call it a future!" said Ulla. She looked ready to cry.

  "As long as I'm alive, it's a future," said Jarl. He glanced at the back wall of the colo­nists' section to the huge sign with its unspar­ing message. "And I'm planning on staying alive. I understand you outposters sometimes take your pick of us colonists for your own stations, Mr. Ten Roos. Want to pick me?"

  "What do you know?" Mark asked.

  "Ki, most sports, publishing, people and how to handle them," Jarl said. "But mostly I'm just better than most of these you see around you. Bigger, brighter, tougher—that much more for your money. I'm a fast learner, also a self-starter. I can work on my own without supervision, and I'm ambitious —but I know when to keep the ambitions under control."

  Mark consulted the records file.

  "Banking?" he asked.

  Jarl flicked a big hand upward momentarily.

  "My family's been in it for generations. I grew up with it," he said. "So, I had to absorb a lot of it through my skin during my first six­teen years or so. If you really want a banker, I can try to summon up some old ghosts, and re-educate myself."

  He stopped and smiled again at Mark.

  "It's the first I heard of them having banks out in the Colonies, though," he said.
>
  "They haven't," answered Mark. He drop­ped the records file to his side and looked at Ulla.

  "Can't you give me a few minutes?" she de­manded. "Can't you leave us alone for just a minute or two?"

  Mark shook his head.

  "You're under my protection," he answer­ed.

  "Jarl can protect me."

  Jarl laughed.

  "Honey-girl," he said. "I'm one of the ones he's protecting you from. No, don't look so shocked. How do you know what I wouldn't be willing to do if it meant making me better off as a colonist?"

  "You wouldn't..." She let the sentence run off.

  "You're wrong," Jarl said softly. "Oh, you're wrong. And the outposter's right. As it happens, you'd be safe all right with me—not only from me but from any of these other colonists as long as I was with you. But he's got no way of knowing that, and he's too good at his own job to take a chance on me, and that's right."

  Ulla looked grimly at Mark.

  "All right," she said. She turned and, bend­ing down her head, began to talk with Jarl in whispers too low for Mark to overhear.

  Mark waited patiently. The slow second hand of his watch crawled around its dial. Suddenly the overhead lights in the colonists' section faded to a glow-worm flicker.

  "Sleep cycle." An amplified voice spoke from overhead. "Beginning of the eight-hour sleep cycle. Keep all noise and movement to a minimum, please."

  Jarl sat up in the shadowed dimness of his lower cot, gently pushing Ulla off, onto her feet.

  "End of interview," he said. "Mr. Ten Roos is ready to leave. Look, we don't want to do anything that'll make him not want me for his station."

  Ulla turned toward Mark, smoothing her face into an expression at least neutral if not congenial. She stepped out between the bunks and turned right in the aisle, toward the bottom of the spiral staircase. Mark turned after her.

  "Just one thing, Mr. Ten Roos, if you don't mind," said Jarl behind him.

  Mark stopped and looked back.

  Jarl nodded toward the big letters of the sign on the wall, still glowing with their own separate light above the twelve hundred colo­nists, then looked back at Mark.